?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
DANNY LYON (1942- ) Portfolio titled The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. A spectacular and rare set complete with 77 photographs, including the 72 originally published in Lyon's seminal book of the same title, as well as five more included in the later edition. Silver prints, the images measuring 12 3/4x10 inches (32.4x25.4 cm.), the sheets 11x14 inches (27.9x35.6 cm.), each with Lyon's signature and his Bleak Beauty stamp with the printer's credit and dates in pencil, on verso. Small folio-sized black box; the colophon with Lyon's signature in pencil; the map with Lyon's signature in ink; contents loose as issued. A UNIQUE PROOF SET. 1967; printed 2005
"I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past. These buildings were used during the Civil War. The men were all dead, but the buildings were still here, left behind as the city grew around them….The passing of buildings was for me a great event. It didn't matter so much whether they were of architectural importance. What mattered to me was that they were about to be destroyed. Whole blocks would disappear. An entire neighborhood. Its few last loft occupying tenants were being evicted, and no place like it would ever be built again. The streets involved were among the oldest in New York and when sections of some were closed by the barriers of the demolition men, it meant they would never be opened again." —Danny Lyon
Long regarded as a classic of architectural and protest photography, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan chronicles the demolition of an incredible 60 acres of primarily 19th-century buildings below Canal Sreet in order to make way for the World Trade Towers, among other massive urban projects. This portfolio includes five additional images that only appeared in the revised, 2002 edition of the book. For the exhibition of the work at ICO Madrid, and the 2020 third edition by Aperture, Lyon recreated the 19th-century insurance map he used to locate the buildings. A unique copy of the map is also in the portfolio, showing both the East and West side Demolition sites, the location of Lyon's loft on Beekman and Williams Street, and his friend Mark di Suvero's loft at Fulton and Front. All of Lyon's original negatives were made in a period of six months in 1967. These prints were made by Chuck Kelton, under the close supervision of Lyon in 2005. This is a unique proof set.
