Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters [Hardcover]

Peter Galassi (Author), Nicholas Nixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2002

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 has made a group portrait of his wife and her three sisters facing the camera in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. 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 allusions to the year of experience that separates it from the one before.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Publisher

A Museum of Modern Art Book 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. 25 photographs in tritone, 1111/4 x 911/4" Nicholas Nixon's work has been widely exhibited and published, and was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1988. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (July 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870700421
• ISBN-13: 978-0870700422
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 9.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,191,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unpretentious masterpiece, April 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Brown Sisters (Museum of Modern Art Books) (Hardcover)

Many of us are called to do this kind of project. Few of us choose to do it because we fear we can't.

Several years ago I saw two of the "Brown Sisters" and never forgot them. "I hope he keeps this up, but I doubt he can. Relationships change. People's goals change. People are vain." So I thought until I read the dedication and thanks in the front of this book years later.

This work ranks with Stieglitz's accidental portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe. Stieglitz, however, makes you want to know a beautiful and unique woman through his poetic intimatcy. Nixon makes you want to know someone as well as he knows the Brown sisters, perhaps as well as they know each other, through a simple directness that few of us have the courage to see or show to each other.

Photography is about time. The Brown Sisters remind us that the value of time is measured by the respect we give each other. This work is direct, primitive and undeniable. It has what Malraux called the sense of inevitability.

I suspect that the older you are the more you will get from this portrait. If you are young, yow will remember it it 10, 20, 30 and more years from now.

If this book doesn't move you, you are either in denial or you should seek some new line of work that doesn't require you to be alive.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Brown Sisters - A Work In Progress, January 24, 2010

By 

Charles Eliot (Duvall, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Thirty-Three Years. (Hardcover)

Nicholas Nixon's continuing series of annual portraits of the four Brown sisters started in the early 70's. "Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters. Thirty-Three Years" collects the portraits up to 2008, a total of 33 years, in a beautifully bound and printed volume, with good surrounding information in the introduction and appendices.

The format of the works is simple: the same 4 women, in the same left-to-right order, shot with an 8x10 view camera. Some of the portraits are splendid, some less so, but it's not the individual isolated images that make this collection so moving.

We know next to nothing about them and their lives beyond the flimsiest of biographical details. We know that they are sisters, we know their relative ages, and we know that the photographer is married to one of them. Everything beyond that is speculation except for one other thing: we share with them the most powerful story of all - the chronological unfolding of human lives. "Capturing the moment" has been one of the enduring themes through the history of photography, co-existing with and exploiting the powerful human urge to fill in the story surrounding snapshot images. The Brown Sisters has, over time, emerged as a very special work of art because the arc of its narrative is so long, and it engages us in a way that we can't avoid. You can see this in action anywhere that the collection is displayed (such as the MOMA in New York). At first a person might look at the images with the eye of the voyueur, scraping for more information: Is this one pregnant? Is that one looking ill? But eventually we stand back and see the irreducible story of human aging, shared with us in poignant and generous and courageous glimpses.

All art carries the challenge of rising above the banality of its own construction: what makes a Warhol painting more than pigment on a canvas, or a Hockney drawing more than marks on paper? A work like The Brown Sisters is so simple in its conception that it's easy to dismiss it as not art at all, or perhaps art by accident. So buyer beware: you might look at these images and see nothing more than family snapshots - albeit by a family lucky enough to have a professional photographer of great skill in its midst. You might, on the other hand, see something very different: the most important story of all, the story of every one of us, told with humility and simplicity and love.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple and stunning, July 26, 2008

By 

Tom and Linda DeLia (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters (Hardcover)

A young friend brought this book over to share with me today, and we paged slowly through each one. She had seen the exhibit and felt that the gallery experience is more powerful than the book because you can see all the photographs as you move around the room and you can keep referring back.

But I was blown away by these pictures! Is that because I have two sisters? Because I am 63 years old and the seemingly simple photographs triggered many emotions about myself and my relationship with my sisters over the years? The expressions on these women's faces are extraordinary, and yet "ordinary," photograph after photograph. Mr. Nixon is very, very talented.

Simply, I loved the book and kept it (with my friend's permission) to share with my husband. My only regret is that it didn't continue for another 9 years to the present! It appears that Mr. Nixon is about 60 years old. I hope he continues photographing the sisters until they are all very old and very gray!