Nicholas Nixon b. 1947

Purchased by the present owner, between 1978 and 2002, from the following galleries: Vision Gallery, Boston; Light Gallery, New York; and Zabriskie Gallery, New York

Nicholas Nixon, The Brown Sisters (The Museum of Modern Art, 1999)

John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978, in conjunction with the exhibition), pp. 146 and 147 

Nicholas Nixon began his series of group portraits of the Brown sisters, Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie, in 1975.  He had met Bebe in 1970, and they married in 1971.  After Nixon completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico, the couple moved to Boston in 1974.  At a Brown family gathering in 1974, Nixon made a photograph of Bebe and her three sisters.  Unhappy with the result, he made a second attempt in July of 1975, and this photograph became the starting point for one of the most remarkable continuing photographic series of the 20^th century.  In this first image, Bebe was 25, Heather 23, Laurie 21, and Mimi 15.  Nixon has continued to make photographs of the four sisters each year since 1975.  Working with an 8 by 10-inch view camera, and contact printing his negatives, Nixon, in collaboration with his subjects, has created a highly detailed and compelling portrait of the sisters spanning four decades. 

The owner of these photographs, a writer and professor of art history, first encountered Nixon’s Brown Sisters images in John Szarkowski’s 1978 exhibition, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960, at The Museum of Modern Art. The owner writes, ‘It was a big sprawling show, with lots of interesting photographs, but a week later I was still thinking about Nixon’s pictures.  I was living in Boston at the time, so I walked over to Vision Gallery, where Nixon showed, and bought the three pictures I’d seen.  They showed Nixon’s wife, Bebe, and her three sisters; they always stood in the same sequence (from left to right: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie), but the settings changed.  In 1975, they were standing before a dark row of trees, at dusk.  In 1976, they were in an open field, with bright sunlight shining from the left.  In 1977, they were indoors, in front of a row of paneled doors.’

Between 1978 and 2002, the owner purchased each year’s addition to the series.  He writes: ‘You could study Nixon’s pictures for hours, and still not see everything that was in them.  The sisters' clothes and hairstyles change, but they remain the same four individuals, registering their feelings in the ways they smile or frown, put an arm over a shoulder, or lean confidently against each other.  Watching them grow over the years, I’ve come to feel like I have a second family.  It’s true that I don’t know them (except for Nick and Bebe), but in compensation I’ve been able to study their faces with an intensity that no member of my actual family would put up with. 

‘As the series has continued, it has outgrown the walls of my apartment.  I remember seeing sixteen of the prints installed in the 1991 exhibition, Motion and Document, Sequence and Time, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy.  Exhibited in a four-by-four grid, they fit effortlessly into a selection of work by artists extending from the photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge to Sol LeWitt and Douglas Huebler.  Nixon had combined the documentary eloquence of photography with the philosophical rigor of conceptual art.  But there was no way to recreate that Minimalist grid on my crowded walls.’