Sunday, June 28, 2026 at 1:00 PM to Saturday, August 1, 2026 at 1:00 PM
NOON-Projects, Los Angeles
NOON Projects is pleased to present Days Change at Night, a solo exhibition of works by Daniel Jack Lyons — his first in Los Angeles.Lyons makes photographs the way other artists make relationships: slowly, with attention, over time. Trained as an anthropologist, he approaches the medium as a form of sustained, reciprocal engagement — returning to the same people across months and years, sharing meals and conversation, allowing trust to accumulate before the camera is ever raised. The images that result bear the mark of this process. They are not taken. They are arrived at together.His practice sits at the intersection of documentary photography and collaborative portraiture, and engages directly with questions that have long preoccupied both fields: who holds the camera, who controls the image, and what it means to represent a community from inside rather than outside it. Lyons works against extractive modes of image-making — the ethnographic gaze, the voyeuristic lens of nightlife photography — by building structures of shared authorship into the work from the start. Those he photographs actively shape how they are seen.The portraits in Days Change at Night grew out of relationships Lyons developed with members of sCUM, a queer club night that operated in East Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020. sCUM was, by many accounts, a genuinely generative social space — a place where a younger generation of queer Angelenos built community, tested identities, and found each other. But the photographs Lyons made are not photographs of the club. They are photographs of people, made mostly elsewhere: in bedrooms, in the quiet of domestic life, in the company of partners, friends, and chosen family. The shift in setting is also a shift in register. Removed from the charged atmosphere of the dance floor, his collaborators present themselves differently — more slowly, more privately, more fully on their own terms.Days Change at Night takes its title from X's 1980 song "Los Angeles," and carries something of that song's atmosphere — the fluid movement between public and private worlds, between who we are at night and who we are by day, between the self we perform and the one we return to.The resulting photographs resist easy categorization. Neither candid documents nor constructed portraits, they are the product of mutual exchange — images that bear the mark of everyone who made them. What Lyons has built, over time and across these relationships, is neither spectacle nor archive, but something closer to portraiture in its oldest sense: a record of people defining themselves, on their own terms, for their own eyes.