Portrait Photography - General & Miscellaneous, Siblings

The Brown sisters

Name: The Brown sisters
Author: Nicholas Nixon
ISBN: 9780810962002

by Nicholas Nixon, New York (Other)

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Overview

The Brown Sisters presents a photographic project as compelling in effect as it is simple in conception: four women, 25 years. Each year since 1975 photographer Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947) has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order. The series now measures a quarter century in the lives of the sisters, who in 1975 ranged in age from 15 to 25. Each picture is dense with allusion to the year of experience that separates it from the one before. Nixon is one of the leading American photographers of his generation. In the 1970s he helped revive the view camera-the old-fashioned box on tripod. He made his mark, however, with the more spontaneous hand-camera, creating portraits that are at once frank, tender, unsentimental, and moving.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Each year for a quarter century the Brown sisters have lined up to have their picture taken by Nixon, a documentary photographer (School and People with AIDS) and husband of the eldest sister, Bebe. Here each image follows another--starting in 1975 and ending in 1999. Together they describe, in mute but luxurious black-and-white tones, subtle and steady changes of mood, age, and intimacy. The sisters' direct gazes allow the viewer the opportunity to study their slowly changing faces and guess at their thoughts. Nixon, present as a shadow cast on the sisters in several images, creates a delicate distance in each portrait, allowing each to tell of a pregnancy, a marriage, or, more often, unnamed and unknowable human experiences. This moving depiction of life's changes and the connection shared by these four evocative women is a fascinating photographic document. Recommended for all larger photography collections.--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Andy Grundberg

While the individual photographs are often remarkable, the series shows us something rare and wonderful: women turning from youth to midlife with incremental grace. Even more captivating is the way in which the sisters' resemblance to one another shifts from picture to picture.
—Bookforum