NICHOLAS NIXON born in 1947, is one of the most celebrated photographers of his generation. Though well known for The Brown Sisters, the continuing annual portrait of his wife Bebe and her three sisters (recently exhibited and published by the Museum of Modern Art), Nixon’s wider project has been less well documented. This will be the first publication to focus on the broader swath of his more than forty year career.
In a published statement about photography written in 1975, Nixon remarked, “The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it.” To present the world as he sees it, Nixon has consistently used unwieldy large-format cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches, to describe life in precise, and often startling detail. His recurring subjects — cities seen from above, people on their porches, landscapes, portraits of the very young and the very old — are woven together throughout his career like the cords of a strong, thick cable.
Nicholas Nixon’s first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. He has since had dozens of museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, and his photographs have been acquired by virtually every museum with a serious interest in photography. The exquisitely reproduced images in About Forty Years present the most thorough view yet of this important artist’s career
