One year, one frame at a time
Taken individually, the 31 photos of the four Brown sisters don’t tell much of a story. But collectively, they are a thought-provoking photographic essay on family, aging and how human relationships develop over time.
It’s the work of Nicholas Nixon, a professional photographer who is married to one of the Browns — Bebe. For 31 years, he’s chosen one black-and-white shot of the sisters, always in natural light and always in the same left-to-right order — Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie. The photos usually are taken on a lawn or beach.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Harvard’s Fogg Museum mounted exhibits for the first 25 photos. Now the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. is displaying all 31.
It’s a small, stark show: a single wall in a single room, three rows of 10 photos each, with an additional one at the end of the middle row.
All the photos are the same size — a little less than 9-by-10 inches — and have simple wooden frames. They show the women side-by-side, usually wearing informal clothes, looking straight ahead. Occasionally the photographer’s shadow falls over the women, adding to the impression of a family snapshot.
The decades are marked for each row, but there are no individual captions. The viewer is left to wonder about the events that have shaped their lives. One thing the photos makes obvious is the closeness of the sisters — nothing has happened in 31 years to prevent their getting together.
Nixon said he never planned for a three-decade project.
“I took the first one the year we were married – I married the eldest,” he said. “It seemed like a good shot to take. There were no boys. I was the first male in the family.”
The next year one of the sisters had just graduated from college, they were all wearing dresses for the occasion, and Nixon had a camera in the car. That’s when it became a series.
Now all four are married, and each has had two children and a professional career. The 2005 photo is somewhat darker than the rest, and detail of their faces is hard to see. Two on the viewer’s right have put on a bit of weight, with biggish hair to match.
“Photography is good at recording a split second,” Nixon said. “But there’s more it can do.” A series like this, he said, can illustrate the passage of time.
Born in Detroit, the 58-year-old Nixon is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He is doing a similar and more somber series on the terminally ill and their families and also has pictured residents of a nursing home and Boston schoolchildren.
He plans to keep photographing the Brown sisters, who are in their 50s and early 60s.
“I intend to keep this one up until I drop, or all of them are gone,” he said.