Nicholas Nixon

(American, b. 1947)

Yazoo City, Mississippi, 1979

The Brown Sisters, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1995

Since 1975, Nicholas Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters producing a single photograph each year featuring the sisters in the same order (youngest to oldest from left to right) though at various locations along the East Coast. From left to right we see Heather, Mimi, Bebe (Nixon’s wife), and Laurie as they change and grow from year to year in image after image. The Brown Sisters series functions as an ever-evolving portrait of the siblings and their relationship to one another over time.

Although best known for his ongoing portrait series of his wife and her sisters, Nicholas Nixon addresses many traditional themes of documentary photography – the family, the elderly, the ill – essentially pictures of people of all and any type. Using an 8-by-10-inch camera, Nixon captures the essential textures, tonalities, and expressions of the people he photographs. The father/daughter portrait Yazoo City, Mississippi is from a series Nixon made of people on their front porches.

Nicholas Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Nixon has worked as an independent photographer since 1974. He is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowships, and a Massachusetts Council for the Arts “New Works” Grant. His photographs have been exhibited at many international museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nixon teaches photography at The Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.

Nixon, Nicholas. The Brown Sisters. New York: London: Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams; Distributed outside the U.S. and Canada by Thames & Hudson, 1999.

Nixon, Nicholas. Family Pictures. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Nixon, Nicholas. Nicholas Nixon. Madrid : Tf. Editores, 2003

Nixon, Nicholas. Photographs from One Year. Carmel, [Calif.]: Boston: Friends of Photography; Institute of Contemporary Art, 1983.

Nixon, Nicholas, and Peter Galassi. Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People. New York: Boston: Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books/Little, Brown and Co., 1988.