Danny Lyon: Junk

JUNK - America in ruins: is a book of pictures of approximately eighty American cars, mostly from the 1950's and 1960's made in the junkyards of the western United States. The pictures are made in Nebraska, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. This is a work of pure visual photography. The premise behind the work is that many things of beautify, sculptures, monuments and buildings, take on a new and added beauty as they deteriorate and become ruins. A pathos, a terrible sadness is added to their original beauty, and this is true of these automobiles, once the beloved machines of people and families that owned and drove them. The first car I remember being in was my father's two door Chevy coup. It was parked down in the street where I could see it down below from our first-floor corner Queens apartment. When you blew the Chevy's horn it played the first few notes of a John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes. From our home in Queens, my father, a physician would drive to his office on Lexington Avenue and 58th street in Manhattan, where, having MD plates, he could always find a place to park. On Sunday's when we drove upstate my brother and I would take turns leaning out the window to drop change into the wire basket as we entered the New York State Through way. By then the Chevy had four doors. In New York City you weren't allowed to drive until you were eighteen, so I couldn't drive myself before I was in college. Sometime in the early 1960's my father bought a used Lincoln Continental, a real monster, which my older brother and I used to drive from NYC on the Throughways and the Pennsylvania Turnpike with its tunnels and turns to reach the University of Chicago. Then when I was twenty-one my father told me his secretary had an used Oldsmobile for sale, and he bought it for me for $400. It was a two door 1953 Olds Deluxe. I used it to blast around the single lane country roads of the deep south, and it was there, in the ecstasy of speeding along a South Georgia highway, during the civil rights movement, with red dirt fields of peanuts and cotton flying by, music blasting on the radio, that I had an epiphany. I realized I was mortal. One day I was going to die. Not that minute, not right then, but some day, in the future, my life would end. I couldn't believe it. How could this end? How could the joy and ecstasy of being alive, of listening to music, or driving fast down a South Georgia road come to an end? But it could, and it would. Time is an abstraction. It doesn't actually exist. We exist, and we make up time to help us describe the past and our belief in a future. My skin is thin, my shoulder hurts because it isn't bone, its metal, and it is sixty years since I learned that I would die, only now, no matter what I do, that moment when I will join with eternity gets closer and closer. That 1953 Oldsmobile I left with a "for sale sign" parked in a New Orleans gas station is now, if it exists at all, sitting in a grassy field, its windows broken, is upholstery gone, is chassis a rusting hunk of steel. It is junk.