MOMA PUBLISHES A TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR PORTRAIT SERIES BY NICHOLAS NIXON
The Museum of Modern Art presents a celebrated project by American photographer Nicholas Nixon in an elegant and compelling book. Once each year since 1975, Nixon has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters, creating a moving testimony to the living of four linked lives. The twenty-five pictures that comprise the series to date are collected in The Brown Sisters, with an afterword by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography. The book will be available in The MoMA Bookstore in early October. The series of photographs, in the Museum's collection, will be on view in ModernStarts: People, from October 7, 1999 through February 1, 2000.
"In one sense the series is utterly simple and familiar, like a family album," says Galassi. "At the same time, Nixon's portraits are unusually subtle and acute. The combination, pursued through a quarter of a century in the lives of four people, is endlessly absorbing."
When Nixon began the series, the Brown sisters ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-five. The following year, with the second picture, Nixon and the four women established the simple ground rules for the project: one picture each year, with the sisters in the same order from right to left. In the summer of 1999, the five participants joined in the annual ritual for the twenty-fifth time.
In the mid-1970s, Nixon had helped to lead a revival of large-camera photography and its aesthetic of precise, luxurious description. He makes his prints by
contact rather than by enlargement, so as to retain in the finished work all of the sharp, delicate detail of his eight-by-ten-inch negatives. In the late 1970s, Nixon became a photographer almost exclusively of people. He learned to wield his big camera with unprecedented ease, to achieve pictures that combine spontaneity, frankness, and warmth. The Brown-sisters series spans his mature career to date. All twenty-five pictures will be exhibited in Posed to Unposed: Encounters with the Camera, a section of ModernStarts: People organized by Darsie Alexander, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.
Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit in 1947. He began to photograph in 1969, the year he earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan. In 1974 he received a Masters of Fine Arts in photography from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. That year he moved to Massachusetts and started teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, where he has been a professor since 1985. His work has been the subject of two exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, Longer Views: 40 Photographs by Nick Nixon (1976) and Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People (1988), and has been widely exhibited in the United States. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1977 and in 1986, and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts since 1976.
PUBLICATION: The Brown Sisters. Nicholas Nixon. Afterword by Peter Galassi. 64 pages, each 11 1/2 x 9 1/2". 25 tritone photographs. Hardcover edition $29.95. Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and available in The MoMA Bookstore.
