In his 2024 memoir, This is My Life I’m Talking About, Lyon recalls a photograph he took in 1963 from the window of his friend’s VW Bug while on their way to a motorcycle race in Wisconsin, “Looking through my 105mm lens, it wasn’t that hard to position the five bikes, speeding away, and push the shutter button, which went off like a small guillotine, a thsssippp sound you could hear across a room.” Twenty years later, it would be declared a “Masterpiece of Twentieth-Century Photography” by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Lyon would go on to make some of his most renowned pictures in this series from moving vehicles, embracing the thrill and the dynamism he sought to capture. “Motion excites me,” he proclaims.

At university, Lyon was introduced to motorcycle racing by his friend, Frank Jenner. Jenner left school to devote himself to racing on a Harley-Davidson he had built in his dorm room, at no small physical cost. After breaking his leg and back at a track in Holland, Michigan in 1963, he was forced to put away the bike for good. The images of Frank and other racers capture their devotion to the culture and the machines around which it was built, embodying the fearlessness and rebellious spirit that would come to define Lyon’s journey with the Outlaws.