“Danny Lyon Unpublished: Vintage Photographs 1963-2005” at the Edwynn Houk Gallery is not only bits and pieces left over from the artist’s many well-known projects, but from his personal pictures as well. Two of the latter are images of himself, “Self-Portrait in a Car Mirror, Chicago” (1965) and “Self-Portrait, Canal Street, NYC” (1969-70), and both show Mr. Lyon (b. 1942) as a young man, unsure of the future and conflicted about the status of his moustache. As it is, things worked out okay.

It is interesting to look through the personal images of a noted photographer, in part because of the same pleasure that comes from peeking through anyone’s family album, and in part to see how he shoots when there are no professional imperatives. “Panel II” (1981-84), “Panel III” (1981-83), and “Panel IV” (1987) are collations of small black-and-white prints arranged neatly in rows and columns, in some instances with hand-painted borders of yellow and blue with little red dots. This is not the way documentary photojournalists typically present their work, but it is what people who treasure their families do to signal that these images are dear to them. Know, then, that Mr. Lyon’s wife is attractive, his kids are active, and that the family seems to have good times on vacation. These snapshots are more than competent, but no more artful than necessary to serve their mnemonic end, which is just as they should be.

Nineteen of the 50 pictures in this show were taken between 1963 and 1967 in Mississippi; Atlanta; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Galveston, Texas. These are pictures by the same young man who photographed himself and his moustache in the rear-view mirror of his car: They are mostly not pictures you would expect from someone who went south to document the civil rights agitation of the time. There is a picture of a cab with “Colored Only” painted on the side, but Mr. Lyon took many sympathetic pictures of young, lower-class whites.

The young woman on a porch in “Knoxville” (1967) could be a cousin of the young women in Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” but the image is more sexually charged. Young men in several pictures are more overtly sexual than middle-class boys would have been; one example is the teenager sitting behind the wheel without a shirt on, in another picture also titled “Knoxville” (1967). The relationship of men and machines is a Lyon specialty, and the four white boys hanging out in a 1950s Ford Sunliner convertible with the top down and the hood up in the third “Knoxville” (1967) are paradigmatic: The car, even though it is not moving, is as much a marker of status as a chariot for some Roman legionnaires.

In “Tallahatchie County, Mississippi” (1964), a young black woman stands with a hoe in a field; in “Atlanta” (1963) a black man with an ambivalent expression holds onto the bars in the back of a police van. But not all the blacks here resemble those ordinarily shown in civil rights photo essays. Roberta and Pumpkin Rene are two transvestites who figure in three photographs from Galveston in 1967. Mr. Lyon’s sympathetic attention to these two young men is characteristic of his explorations on the margins of society and beyond.

Similarly, the 13 candid pictures from his bike-riders series taken between 1964 and 1966 show aspects of class, the symbiosis of men – and occasionally women – with machines, and sex that are not often photographed. Not many photographers beside Danny Lyon would be tolerated as close as he gets. “Humphrey, New Orleans” (1964) portrays a pudgy, middle-aged biker with horn-rimmed glasses and a cardboard Halloween skeleton taped to his windshield who upsets our louche expectations. It is vintage Lyon.

***

The Keith de Lellis Gallery has a talent for bringing attention to overlooked photographers and genres. Most of the pictures in “Still Life: 20th Century Photographs” were taken between 1916 and the mid 1930s, some by familiar artists such as Man Ray, Alexander Rodchencko, Edward Steichen, and Paul Woolf, but others by people whose names were new to me or only dimly remembered. Because it is organized around a genre, the show emphasizes the corporate nature of the medium, how at any given time many photographers will be grappling with the same aesthetic issues. Here it is the contestation between lovely pictorialism and stark modernism.

Guy Gayler Clark’s “The Fly Swatter” (1916), a chlorobromide print, was shot in classic pictorialist soft focus. The fly swatter is in the background and blurred almost beyond recognition; the mid-ground bowl and flower vase are somewhat clearer, but only an apple in the foreground is sharp. The tones are delicate shades of gray. The effect is relaxed and quite pretty.

Edward Quigley’s “Ellipsoid” (c. 1935), a gelatin silver print, feels radically different. The subject is a peeled egg in a steel egg slicer whose taut wires are just beginning to impress themselves on the egg’s as-yet unbroken, soft, white flesh. The choice of subject is somewhat comic, but the organic oval of the egg and the straight lines and right angles of the manufactured slicer provide an interesting contrast. The focus is sharp, and a single light source puts the egg and its slicer into high relief. The overall effect is cerebral and ironic.

Other notable images include Edward Weston’s “Artichoke Halved” (1930), a close-up that sexualizes an otherwise innocent vegetable; Dr. Paul Wolff’s “Trichterlilie” (1925), which sets the flower as a delicate abstraction against a black background; and Robert Janssen’s “Sunflower Seed”(c.1945), an extreme close-up that fills the frame with the one seed, revealing vertical bands of light and dark, and a sense of the texture of the shell.

The last of the 33 still lifes, one of only two in color, is a paean to red, H.I. Williams’s “Untitled” (c. 1939). It looks like an illustration for a chapter in the Betty Crocker cookbook devoted to strawberries: strawberries sliced and whole, in pies and tarts, on cakes, and glopped with whipped cream. Maybe not great art, but it looks good to eat.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Lyon until April 22 (745 Fifth Avenue, suite 407, between 57th and 58th Streets, 212-750-7070). “Still Life” until April 15 (47 E. 68th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-327-1482).