Danny Lyon The Dominoes Players. Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas, USA. 1968.
The Walls is the oldest unit in the Texas prison, opened in 1849. Beginning in 1982, 562 men have died in its execution chambers. I
(...) spent most of 1968 walking around inside the Walls. I used the prints I was making for Conversations with the Dead , most of them in Bruce Davidson’s darkroom on W. 86th street, to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Afterward the foundation asked if they could have one of the prints. It was The Dominoes Players. In the 1990s, Magnum sent that roll of negatives to a printer for an enlargement and for some reason the printer cut the frame off from the strip of six, frame 36, the last image on the roll. Another decade went by and Magnum decided my original cellulose negative sleeves were not archival so all the prison negatives were moved from the original sleeves into archival paper sleeves. Only the person doing this neglected to look inside the originals for a single separated frame. The old sleeves were burned in the garbage and that was the end of the negative of one of the best pictures I would ever make. I had a single surviving vintage print, and with the arrival of the digital age, it was scanned allowing these small prints to be made.
- Danny Lyon © Danny Lyon | Magnum Photos
