Danny Lyon, San Luis, New Mexico, 2014

Narrator: Here, Lyon focuses on a lone boulder in the desert. In recent years, Lyon has increasingly focused on the New Mexican landscape and fossils. These images serve as records of an ancient geological past—one whose continuity is in danger of being disrupted by overdevelopment and other forms of environmental degradation.

Julian Cox: In some ways this is a picture that doesn't look like a Danny Lyon photograph. It looks unlike anything that we know him to have made prior to this point.

I think that's not uncommon with an artist as they begin to move into the sort of final phase of their career and they begin to look retrospectively at the work they've created over a lifetime and begin to look to making simple straightforward photographs that distill the specific subject down to the absolute minimum.

Narrator: This is the last stop on our tour of Danny Lyon: Message to the Future. But it’s far from Lyon’s final work. He continues to take photographs and produce books. He also maintains a blog, Bleak Beauty, that mixes photography and political writing.

Thanks for joining me today. Please enjoy the rest of your visit to the Whitney.