In the summer of 1962, Danny Lyon packed a Nikon Reflex and an old Leica in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Within a week he was in jail in Albany, Georgia, looking through the bars at another prisoner: Martin Luther King Jr. Lyon soon became the first staff photographer for the Atlanta-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He traveled with SNCC from Mississippi to Georgia to Tennessee to Alabama, and to the 1963 March on Washington.

Twin Palms Publishers issued Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement in 2010 as a hardcover of 201 pages with 196 duotone plates, measuring 9 x 12 inches. The book is more than a portfolio. It gathers Lyon’s photographs with his archive of press releases, speeches, flyers, personal recollections and facsimiles of typed notes made while working with SNCC. Julian Bond, a SNCC co-founder, provides the foreword; Lyon contributes the main text; and John Lewis, who chaired SNCC and later represented Georgia in Congress, supplies the afterword.

The photographs are direct and unhurried, often close to the ordinary circumstances—meetings, arrests, marches, waiting—in which political courage was sustained. Lyon studied history and philosophy at the University of Chicago and later produced acclaimed series on motorcyclists and on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections. Here that documentary temperament meets a subject of national consequence.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in this union of primary documents and photographs, and in the collaboration with Bond and Lewis, which places the imagery within the movement’s own memory rather than at a distance from it. As one of the earliest sustained photographic records made from inside SNCC, it remains a key title for collections built around American documentary photography, civil rights history, or the photobook as a form that can hold an archive as well as a sequence of pictures.