American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is famed internationally for his large-format black-and-white photographs of intimate everyday moments. His first solo exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Nixon’s early depictions of Boston and New York in the mid-1970s were featured in one of the most influential exhibitions of that decade, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester. He is also famed for his series People with AIDS, begun in 1987. For his most iconic series, The Brown Sisters, he created an annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, consistently posed in the same left to right order, as they grew and aged over nearly a half century. His oeuvre, however, encompasses a much broader spectrum, from his documentation of life in the American South to his landscape portraits of the rough industrial terrains around Detroit. Nicholas Nixon: Closing the Distance takes us on a journey through the artist’s life and work—at once distant and intimate and close—and features new, previously unpublished photographs.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel.
American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is best known for The Brown Sisters, his ongoing series of annual portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters (recently exhibited and published by The Museum of Modern Art). But Nixon's wider oeuvre has been less well documented. Long overdue, Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years will be the first publication to focus on the broader swath of Nixon's more than 40-year career. In a published statement about photography written in 1975, Nixon remarked, "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it." To present the world as he sees it--in fascinating, precise and often startling detail--Nixon has consistently used unwieldy large-format cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches. His recurring subjects--cities seen from above, people on their porches, landscapes, portraits of the very young and the very old--are woven together throughout his career like the cords of a cable. Nixon's large-format black-and-white photography is simultaneously intimate, technically precise and somehow relaxed. Beautifully designed and with exquisitely reproduced images, About Forty Years presents the most thorough view yet of this important artist's career.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Afterword by Sarah Hermanson Meister.
In August 1974, the photographer Nicholas Nixon made a group portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie--the Brown sisters. He did not keep that image, but in 1975 he made another portrait of the four, who then ranged in age from 15 to 25. Working with an 8 x 10-inch view camera, whose large negatives capture a wealth of detail and a luscious continuity of tone, Nixon did the same in 1976, and this second successful photograph prompted him to suggest to the sisters that they assemble for a portrait every year. The women agreed and have gathered for an annual portrait ever since. Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of the Brown Sisters celebrates the 40th anniversary of the series with luminous tritone reproductions of all 40 portraits and a new afterword by Sarah Hermanson Meister, which examines the series' public exhibitions, critical reception, and cult following. Like the previous editions of the series, published in 1999 and 2008 for its 25th and 33rd anniversaries (both out of print), Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of the Brown Sisters is a milestone in an ongoing project that we hope will continue for many years to come.
Sarah Hermanson Meister became a Curator at The Museum of Modern Art in 2009, having joined the Department of Photography in 1997 as a Curatorial Assistant. Ms. Meister has organized a number of exhibitions for the Museum, including Picturing New York: Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art, Eugène Atget: “Documents pour artistes”, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (with Roxana Marcoci and Eva Respini) and the photography galleries within Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture.
Nicholas Nixon is known for the ease and intimacy of his large format photography. He has photographed porch life in the rural South, the changing Boston cityscape, sick and dying people, the intimacy of couples, and an ongoing annual portrait of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, beginning in 1975. Included in the seminal 1975 exhibition New Topographics, Nixon is major figure in American photography of the latter half of the twentieth century. In Close Far, Nixon presents a dichotomous group of photos made with his signature large-format view camera, in this case one with an 11x14 inch negative. The first half of the book contains self-portraits, comprising in Nixon's words "sketches of an old man." Filled with anxiety, longing and contentedness, these images chronicle the shapes, slopes and pores of Nixon's face. The second half of the book shows views of buildings in the densest part of Boston. Made from high within the buildings and with the same camera, these images without horizons do not gaze down upon but rather through the city. With the lens in the same orientation as his self-portrait photos, Nixon's results are remarkable for their richness of detail and complexity of form.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Afterword by Peter Galassi.
In August of 1974, the photographer Nicholas Nixon made a group portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie--the Brown sisters. He did not keep that image, but in 1975 he made another portrait of the four, who then ranged in age between 15 and 25. Working with an 8x10-inch view camera, whose large negatives capture a wealth of detail and a luscious continuity of tone, Nixon did the same in 1976, and this second successful photograph prompted him to suggest to the sisters that they assemble for another portrait every year. The women agreed, and have continued to agree every year since. In 1999, when the resulting series of photographs reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, The Museum of Modern Art published The Brown Sisters, presenting all of the portraits in sequence. That edition is out of print. Now, as the family's "annual rite of passage," as Nixon has called it, hits year 33--a third of a century--the Museum is publishing a second edition, including eight new photographs that bring the series up to date. "We might wish," writes Peter Galassi, the Museum's Chief Curator of Photography, "that our family included a photographer of such discipline and skill…but otherwise Nixon's pictures do what all family photographs do: they fix a presence and mark the passage of time, graciously declining to expound or explain."
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Afterword by Peter Galassi.
The Brown Sisters presents a photographic project as compelling in effect as it is simple in conception: four women, 25 years. Each year since 1975 photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The series now measures a quarter century in the lives of the sisters, who in 1975 ranged in age from 15 to 25; each picture is dense with allusions to the year of experience that separates it from the one before.
Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years
Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Forty Years.
Nicholas Nixon: Close Far
Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters
Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters