Nicholas Nixon (born October 27, 1947) is an American photographer, known for his work in black-and-white of people and cityscapes, and for using the 8×10 inch view camera.
Nixon's subjects include marginalized people living along the Charles River near Boston and in Cambridge as well as cities in the South, people nearing death in nursing homes and those who suffered from AIDS (and their families), school children and the blind, and the intimacy of couples, his family and himself, predominantly in the nude. Nixon's photographs, resulting almost exclusively in black-and-white contact prints, record his subjects with meticulous detail in portraits and close-ups in order to facilitate a connection between the viewer and the subject.
Biography Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. Nixon gained a B.A. in American literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (near Detroit), in 1969, and began studying photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he met Beverly ("Bebe") Brown, and got married a year later in 1971. After Nixon graduated with a M.F.A. in 1974 the couple moved to Brookline near Boston where he began working as a part-time professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MCA) and continued teaching there until March 2018. Bebe worked for PBS as editor,Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 27. writer and producer.She wrote and produced e. g. The Miracle of Life, an originally Swedish documentary, that was adapted for PBS Nova. Bebe Nixon at the IMDb. They have two kids, Sam, born 1983, and Clementine, born in 1985.
Work The large format Working in an Ann Arbor bookshop Nixon studied art books for himself and accidentally discovered a book with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, which impressed him very much so, that he took a summer class in photography. Subsequently, he bought a 35 mm Leica M3, without knowing it was HCB's camera model, too, but with a wider 35 mm lens. One day in 1969 he spotted a print by Walker Evans and was "bowled over" by the "heightened, hallucinatory, voluptuous quality of the description [...] the sensual primal force was akin to Faulkner or Yeats or Joyce, my heroes at the time."
He consequently began working with large-format cameras, at first he made "hand-held landscapes" with a 4×5 inch (10×12 cm) view camera. but soon he began photographing exclusively with 8×10 inch (20×25 cm) on a tripod. Occasionally he also used an even bulkier 10x12 inch (25×30 cm) camera, and in 2015 he began photographing on huge 14×17 inch (36×43 cm) negatives to photograph his family and the project on the blind at Perkins School. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on fast 35 mm and medium-format film with easily portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed contact prints to be made directly from the large format negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image in whole. Nixon has said "When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time [...] I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large." The slow process also made the sitters and the photographer feel more involved with each other, the space in front of the camera becomes a stage.Thomas Weski. Nicholas Nixon: Familienbilder, Hannover, Germany: Sprengel Museum, 1994. ISBN 3-89169-076-2, pp. 9–11 (in German).
First exhibitions 15 of Nixon's early city views taken of Boston (and two of Cambridge) in 1974–1975 were shown in his first group exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in 1975, along with images of his friends Frank Gohlke, Robert Adams, Joe Deal and John Schott.Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 22 f. The other photographers were Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel and Bernd and Hilla Becher (See Nordström/Salvesen 2009). Rochester was a remote place and the show was "pretty much unnoticed".Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 23. In hindsight it turned out to be one of the most influential photographic exhibitions of the decade, which defined the New Topographics genre. In the small catalogue of the exhibition, William Jenkins, the show's curator who had coined the title, included short statements of some of the photographers to his introduction. There, Nixon's often cited notion first appears:New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Rochester: International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1975, p. 5. Reprinted as facsimile in: (First cited by Galassi in 1988, then e. g. by Weski in 1994 and by Gollonet Carnicero in 2017).
At the time Nixon himself was more excited about his first solo exhibition that would take place only a few months later in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) made possible by its curator John Szarkowski, the single most important promoter of new developments in photography in the 1960s and 1970s. Beside the urban vistas and some landscapes Szarkowski chose to integrate the initial two images of the series Nixon had just began to take annually of his wife Bebe Brown and her three sisters.Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 24. Szarkowski was also crucial for his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. "After them, people came to me, and as a result I have had the wonderful luxury of never having to worry about my career or to promote myself in any way."
Pictures of People Nixon developed an ever growing interest in people, as they first slipped into his pictures as tiny figures and then gradually became the center of his photographs.
The Friends of Photography in Carmel, CA, staged a show of his recent work and published his first book, Photographs from One Year, in 1983.Photographs from One Year (Untitled 31). Introduction by Robert Adams. Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography, 1983. ISBN 0-933286-33-3. His son, Sam, was born that year, and while taking photographs of him and his wife, an interest in the nude evolved. Their daughter Clementine was born two years later, and he continued his series of family photographs,First exhibited as a series in 1986 at the Fraenkel Gallery, his primary gallery on the West Coast since 1980. See "Chronology" by Carlos Martin, in: Gollonet Carnicero 2017, pp. 270, 271. adding himself in these very intimate images in 1997, when he also introduced the vertical format to his work.See "Chronology" by Carlos Martin, in: Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 272. Almost equally intimate were the series of portraits and close-ups he took in a nursing home, where he initially had done voluntary social work. People who were near their death became a more urgent subject, when in 1987 he began documenting people who suffered from AIDS, a viral disease almost unknown and stigmatized at that time. A main subject became Tom Moran, the speaker of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts. With the project Bebe helped him, and wrote the text for the final book, People with AIDS, published in 1991.Nicholas and Bebe Nixon. People with AIDS. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1991.
In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art was finally again the first institution to organize a comprehensive exhibition of his latest work, which traveled subsequently to Boston, Detroit and San Francisco. Peter Galassi, an art historian he befriended when Galassi was an intern at the museum in the mid-70s, curated the show and edited the second book of Nixon's work, which comprised images of a decade, from the People series (1978–1982) to the then ongoing project of People with AIDS. It was the only project by Nixon, which was intended to be published as a book, to raise awareness of the disease. Otherwise Nixon's main objective in his work is principally the photographic print (and almost exclusively the contact print), not the photo book, as it is for many others of his colleagues (or any other form of publication).Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 25.
Close and Far In the late nineties, Nixon returned to documenting Boston's urban landscape that was changing during the Big Dig highway development project. This time he used a longer lens in order to flatten the space. Another new approach was the enlargement of these images. He also produced prints in 20 × 24 inches (about 50 × 60 cm) of The Brown Sisters series, he was astound they weren't going to be vulgar, but instead it "increased availability of zheir emotions and psychology".Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 29.
These images were shown in 2003 at the Zabriskie Gallery in Manhattan under the title Close and Far, combined with close-ups of bodies (published in a book not until 2013). Lovers, a series also called Couples, originated in 1999–2001 and presented for the first time at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, which also premiered his series Patients with photographs Nixon took between 2005 and 2007 in several Boston hospitals portraying anew some severely sick people. He had already revisited the subject of sickness in 2000 with a fellowship of The George Gund Foundation, and in 2015 again on commission to portrait undergoing palliative treatments. The time he began to photograph digitally, which allowed him to get even closer to his sitters while reducing exposure times."Chronology" by Carlos Martin, in: Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 275.
In 2013 he presented for the first time images in color. It was an ongoing series of close-ups of him and Bebe as a couple, who loved each other and was happy for a long time. Here, Nixon perceived Bebe as more of a collaborator.Short statement by Nixon about the New Work uploaded on Vimeo by the Fraenkel Gallery in 2013."Chronology" by Carlos Martin, in: Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 274. After a year of experimenting with digital photography as well as color, he abonded both again unsatisfied with the results that could rival analog black-and-white prints.Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 32.
Retrospectives In 2017, when Nixon became 70 years old, the a major retrospective exhibition was directed by the Spanish Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in cooperation with C/O Berlin in the capital of Germany, which traveled also to Almería and Brussels to respective institutions for photography there. The show was accompanied by a comprehensive publication. In 2021, the photographic gallery Le château d'eau in Toulouse presented the first major exhibition of Nixon's work in France, accompanied by an expanded catalogue as well.
The Brown Sisters Nixon's most commonly known project, which already is part of the history of photography, The Brown Sisters, is a consistend series of an annually group portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three younger sisters. He began to photograph them in 1975, when Bebe was 25 and her siblings were 15 (Mimi), 21 (Laurie) and 23 (Heather) years old. Her family had already the tradition of taking a family picture annually for their Christmas cards. Nixon disliked the usual "phony" smiles, and he initially discarded a first group portrait he did himself.Nixon in Gollonet Carnicero 2017, p. 31. But the following year he took a photograph of them they were all content with, and after the next one in the following year they agreed to begin a series: annually he would photograph the sisters with his 8×10 inch camera, outside in natural light, them always posing in the same already established order, and all facing the camera (which happened with only rare exceptions).Gollonet Carnicero 2017, pp. 18 and 270.