I specially went to Bottrop to see the Nixon series on the Brown sisters in 2004 and i was not disappointed ( poster available at www.ftn-books.com).
Nicholas Nixon takes intimate, black-and-white photographs of children, the elderly and infirm, and his own family (as well as cityscapes). Best known for his series “The Brown Sisters”, Nixon began taking portraits of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters in 1975, and has continued to photograph them annually since.
left the Brown Sisters in 1980 , right the Sisters in 2019
Influenced by the photography of Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others, Nixon works with a large-format camera; “For me the print is what matters most. Generally the biggest possible negative has the most clarity, presence, and believability,” he has said. Nixon’s images, which include close-up self-portraits of the artist’s bearded face, manifest the humanistic potential of photography, offering moments of tenderness between individuals, and meticulously capturing the minute details of his subjects.
