Nicholas Nixon

Carlos Gollonet

A comprehensive retrospective of American photographer Lee Friedlander featuring previously unseen photographs from the artist's personal archive.

Lee Friedlander

Photographs from One Year

Peter Galassi

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: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", Nixon is a 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. Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit in 1947 and has lived in the Boston area for over forty years. He has received numerous awards including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2005, Nixon's ongoing portrait of the Brown sisters was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others. Nixon's books include The Brown Sisters (2005) and Live Love Look Last, published by Steidl in 2011.

Close Far

Sarah Hermanson Meister

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 from 15 to 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 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 fortiethanniversary of the series in 2014, featuring luminous tri-tone reproductions of all forty portraits, and a new afterword by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister, which examines the series public exhibitions, critical reception, and cult following. Like the previous editions of the series, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and 2008 for the twenty-fifth and thirtythird anniversaries of the series, and both out of print, Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of The Brown Sisters is an important chapter in an ongoing project that we hope will continue for many years more.

Forty Years

The Brown Sisters

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

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