Synopses & Reviews
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.