# When the EPA Sent Danny Lyon to Houston πŸ“· > In April 1973, photographer Danny Lyon documented downtown Houston for the EPA's DOCUMERICA project. Here's what he was pointing his camera atβ€”and why it matters. **By:** Marcus Bellamy Shaw **Published:** August 8, 2026 **Tags:** 1970s Texas, Danny Lyon, DOCUMERICA, EPA photography, Houston history --- April 1973. Danny Lyon points a camera at downtown Houston and shoots 21 frames on black and white film. The resulting series now sits in the [National Archives and Records Administration](https://www.archives.gov/research/environment/documerica-photographers) β€” federal property, public domain, proof that somebody in the U.S. government once thought it mattered to look hard at what American cities actually looked like. That somebody was the EPA. ## What DOCUMERICA Was β€” and Why It Existed DOCUMERICA β€” a portmanteau of "document" and "America" β€” was a program sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" in the United States, running from about 1972 to 1977. The EPA itself was barely two years old when the project got underway. In November 1971, the newly created EPA announced a monumental photodocumentary project to record changes in the American environment. The scale was enormous. By 1974, DOCUMERICA had produced more than 81,000 photographs by more than 100 photographers β€” the strongest 22,000-plus images catalogued by NARA and made available to publications nationwide. Photographers working for the project received $150 a day β€” equivalent to roughly $1,155 today β€” along with film and expenses. The intellectual model was deliberate. DOCUMERICA's director, Gifford Hampshire, was a passionate proponent of documentary photography and envisioned his project as a 1970s version of the Farm Security Administration's photography program of the Great Depression, which had produced iconic images like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. Big shoes. And they knew it. Photographers were given wide creative latitude. Early assignments targeted rigid pollution metrics, but the lenses quickly widened. Freelance crews began capturing the messy, beautiful totality of 1970s American geography: steelworkers on the Houston waterfront, clear-cut logging lines in the Pacific Northwest, traffic jams, junk yards, and children playing on porches in the shadow of smokestacks. The project became something more than an inventory. It became a portrait. ## Why Danny Lyon, and Why Houston All of Lyon's work operates in the style of photographic New Journalism β€” the photographer has become immersed in, and is a participant in, the documented subject. That's not a description of technique; it's a description of ethics. Lyon wasn't new to Texas by the time he showed up in Houston in April 1973. In 1967, Lyon drove from his home in New York to Huntsville, Texas, where, over the course of 14 months, he visited and photographed seven penitentiaries. The resulting raw, empathetic images of marginalized individuals were published in 1971 as the highly regarded photobook Conversations with the Dead. Texas had changed his life β€” by his own account. He came back. While on assignment for DOCUMERICA, Lyon captured striking images of inner city American life of the early 1970s, including neighborhoods in El Paso, Houston, Galveston, Chicago, and the boroughs of New York City. That Houston-Galveston pairing isn't coincidental β€” the Gulf Coast was its own specific environmental story, petrochemical smoke on the water, refinery fumes drifting across the Ship Channel into neighborhoods that had no say in the matter. The series of 21 black-and-white photographs Lyon made of downtown Houston in April 1973 is now preserved as part of the National Archives collection, anchored by NARA identifier 557631. Twenty-one frames. You have to wonder what he decided to leave out. ## Houston in 1973: What the Camera Was Pointing At Houston in 1973 wasn't the glass-tower skyline that dominates the view today. The city was mid-boom, mid-sprawl, mid-smog. In the summer of 1973, environmental air samples confirmed what anyone walking down Main Street already felt: a heavy, suffocating concentration of hydrocarbons trapped by the Texas heat, an atmosphere that smelled indistinguishably from auto exhaust and refinery floor tailings. That's the context Lyon was photographing into. Not just a skyline. A chemical atmosphere. The Houston Ship Channel β€” a 52-mile waterway stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Houston β€” was encompassed by hundreds of industrial plants converting oil and gas into chemical building blocks: plastics, fertilizer, pesticides. The fenceline communities β€” working-class Black and brown neighborhoods sitting closest to those stacks β€” had been absorbing that load for decades before anyone with a federal mandate showed up to photograph it. Lyon's black-and-white choice matters here. Color might have prettied it up, or at least diffused it. Black and white flattens everything into contrast: light and shadow, sky and steel, the face of a city and whatever it was doing to the people in it. ## What DOCUMERICA Left Behind Because the images were part of a federal government project, photographers were required to waive their copyright, placing the images in the public domain. That clause, which likely felt bureaucratic and irritating in 1973, is now the reason these photographs are freely accessible to anyone. A gift from the administrative state, accidentally. In 2013, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., displayed a curated exhibition titled "Searching for the Seventies: The Documerica Photography Project." Half a century later, the images still circulate β€” historians, journalists, urban researchers pulling them out to show what American cities looked and felt like before the Clean Air Act had teeth, before environmental justice was a phrase anyone used in polite company. Lyon's Houston series is one piece of a much larger record. DOCUMERICA ultimately collected tens of thousands of photos that serve the agency and the public as a visual baseline for comparing how the environment looked then with how it looks now. That baseline function is more valuable now than it might have seemed in 1977 when the project wrapped. It's evidence. Documentary evidence, made by photographers who were paid by the government to go look at things most people preferred not to see. Many of the photographs preserve a distinct visual record of time and place. That's an understatement from the official catalog description. What Lyon made in Houston in April 1973 is a specific, irreplaceable look at a specific city at a specific hinge point β€” right when America was just beginning to reckon with what unchecked industrial growth actually costs. Most people walk right past that kind of photograph in an archive. Don't. _Have you come across other DOCUMERICA photographs of Texas? Or know what specific blocks of downtown Houston Lyon was working when he shot this series? Drop what you know in the comments._ --- **About the author:** Marcus Bellamy left Michigan in 2024 with his wife Jesi, drove south, and kept driving until the air smelled like the Gulf. They landed in Galveston and decided that was that. He writes about Texas history, culture, and the communities that make this state unlike anywhere else β€” a perspective sharpened by being someone who chose Texas deliberately, not by accident of birth. His interests run from Gulf Coast fishing and boating to technology, science fiction, and the kind of deep-cut local history most people scroll past. Every Bit Texas is his attempt to make sure those stories don't disappear. --- _Read the full article at [everybittexas.com/posts/when-the-epa-sent-danny-lyon-to-houston](https://everybittexas.com/posts/when-the-epa-sent-danny-lyon-to-houston)_ [← All Posts](https://everybittexas.com/posts/index.md)