Trained as an anthropologist, American photographer Daniel Jack Lyons approaches photography as a form of sustained, reciprocal engagement; returning to the same people across months and years, allowing trust to accumulate before the camera is raised. Working against extractive modes of image-making, he builds shared authorship into each project from the start, so that those he photographs actively shape how they are seen. The result is a body of work that reads less as documentary than as collaborative portraiture: images arrived at together, bearing the mark of everyone who made them.
His most recent solo exhibition, Days Change at Night, opened at NOON Projects in Los Angeles in June 2026 — his first show in the city — and grew out of relationships he developed with members of sCUM, a queer club night that ran in East Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020. His debut monograph, Like a River (Loose Joints, 2022), documents queer and trans youth in the Brazilian Amazon. Lyons has exhibited internationally in Paris, Melbourne, New York, Milan, Amsterdam, Warsaw, London, and Mozambique, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Perfect, The New Yorker, Vogue Italia, i-D, Vanity Fair, and WSJ.