Steven Lyon is an artist working across photography, film, and writing — a witness by discipline, whose work spans more than four decades: fashion, fine art, documentary film, and conservation.
In 1982, on Sunset Boulevard, Steven was photographed by Andy Warhol at the Mondrian Hotel, in his underwear, for Interview magazine — the start of a decade in front of the camera, working for Versace, Trussardi, Cerruti, and Jean Paul Gaultier, photographed by Paolo Roversi and Giovanni Gastel, with editorial in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ.
By the mid-1990s, Steven had begun moving from in front of the camera to behind it — his first real photographs were shot at Woodstock ’94, published in Paris Match in France and Stern in Germany. By 1998 he’d crossed fully behind the lens, spending the better part of two decades in Paris, building a noir, expressionist visual language shaped by Italian neorealism, German Expressionism, and the film noir of the ’40s — a language he still works in today, primarily on film, hand-printed and self-retouched at every stage.
That eye followed him to Africa in 2004, and by 2013 it had become something larger: a 1,000-kilometer trek through the South African bush, made to bear witness to the rhino poaching crisis first-hand. The walk became A Journey That Matters, the feature documentary Steven has spent more than a decade completing — and Lyonheartlove, the nonprofit he founded that year to carry the work forward. More than a decade on, the story has changed: rhino poaching in South Africa has fallen for three years running, and the film has become the record of that fragile, hard-won turn.
Steven’s flagship monograph, Artist of Light, gathers four decades of the work — fashion, portraiture, landscape, wildlife, fine-art nudes — into a single, self-curated object: 544 pages, linen-bound, in a clamshell case, currently in final proofing in Germany. A signed Special Edition includes an 11×14 platinum print.
Steven works today from Lyonheart Studio, his loft and darkroom in downtown Los Angeles. Across every medium, the work returns to the same discipline: to see clearly, and to make a record that lasts.
“Know your camera, know your light, love your subject.”