Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision

Exhibition Website

Dec 13 2017 - Apr 12 2018

The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it.   - Nicholas Nixon

Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon has captured the intimate details of family, relationships, and life as it unfolds in front of his camera. Using a large-format 8 x 10–inch camera and black-and-white film, he has photographed Boston’s changing landscape, porch life in the rural South, sick or dying people, and his own family. This exhibition surveys the artist’s prolific career and is organized around Nixon’s remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety, and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work, including schools in and around Boston, people with AIDS, couples, and landscapes. Together these pictures underscore photography’s singular ability to capture the passage of time in incremental moments and are a testament to Nixon’s extraordinary persistence of vision.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Forty Years  is a collection of gorgeous photographs of his wife and her three sisters begun in 1975. Working with an 8 x 10-inch view camera, whose large negatives capture a wealth of detail and a luscious continuity of tone, Nixon photographed the women annually ever since. Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Forty Years celebrates the 40th anniversary of the series with luminous tritone reproductions of all 40 portraits and a new afterword by Sarah Hermanson Meister, which examines the series' public exhibitions, critical reception, and cult following.

Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Forty Years

  • Photography
  • American
  • 20th Century
  • Nicholas Nixon

Exhibition Venues & Dates