Nicholas Nixon

  • September 18, 2012 7:00 AM

An internationally recognized photographer, Nicholas Nixon has helped shape the dialogue of photographic discourse for over four decades. His work gained broad attention when it was included in one of the most influential exhibitions of the 1970s, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in 1975. His first solo museum exhibition in 1976 was curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Nixon has explored a vast range of subject matter, including the changing urban landscape in and around Boston, as well as portraits of people who live there. His camera has captured intimate portraits of people in nursing homes, the blind, sick, and dying. He has also included his family in this revealing visual biography of people who have inspired him.

In 1975, Nixon began one of his most famous ongoing projects entitled The Brown Sisters, Truro, Massachusetts. The series consists of an annual portrait of his wife and her three sisters, consistently posed in the same left-to-right order. To date there are 38 portraits in all, tracking time through the faces of his family. The entire series of this critically acclaimed project is in the collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Nixon will discuss the development of this and other photographic projects with the Museum’s Chief Curator, Michael Auping.

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters, Truro, Massachusetts, 2011