Bob Lyon started with photography by learning to do wet-plate tintypes, the kind of photography done during the Civil War. Since then he has done photojournalism—having work published in the Washington Post, Rugby Magazine, Der Speigel, Civilization Magazine, Mother Jones, L’Express, and the International Herald Tribune, among other print media. Bob specializes in large format photography, using a one hundred year old 4” x 5” Korona. Much of Bob’s large format work has been for the National Park Service in the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record programs. These photographs are filed at the Library of Congress-‐think of the last scene in the first Indiana Jones movie—except these photographs are available online.
His projects have varied from Anasazi ruins in New Mexico to Minuteman III missile complexes in South Dakota. He also visited all 100 Air Force Missile Launch Control Centers in the 1990s to document their artwork. The missile crews painted their underground facilities, rather similar to nose art on bombers in World War II.
From Colorado and a resident of Anchorage for two years, Bob hasn’t produced many local images yet, but he is enthusiastically photographing the Alaska scene. Go here to see some of his work.
Bob currently works for the National Park Service in Anchorage, mainly tasked with historic preservation. One of the projects to which he has been assigned is the preservation of Soapy Smith’s saloon in Skagway, Alaska, at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.
Bob Lyon