Campaigner, social anthropologist, researcher, LA-based Daniel Jack Lyons has many life experiences to draw on for his startling, important and politically charged photography work.

He has a background in medical anthropology and has worked on many international community-based research projects. His work focuses largely on marginalized youth, from spaces on the outskirts of society to conflict zones. “The participatory and ethnographic nature of the projects that I have worked on have shaped the way I approach photography,” he says. “I spend a good amount of time with people before taking out my camera.”

Lyons has focused his lens on the LGBQT community in Mozambique, with his Hotel Luso project, Ukraine during the Russian invasion for Displaced Youth, and indigenous people in the Amazon for Like A River. “Learning a person’s background, daily life, struggle, accomplishments, and familial stories, and then being invited to collaborate and be accepted as a friend—it’s all very humbling for me.”

Lyons is  a regular contributor to the New York Times, More Or Less, and Vogue Italia.