The Brown Sisters (From The Brown Sisters Series) by Nicholas Nixon

Provenance:
Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
John Szarkowski, "Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960", New York, 1978
Peter Galassi, "Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People", New York, 1988
Sarah Greenough et al., "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography", Washington, D.C. and Chicago, 1989, no. 340
Robert Adams, "Beauty in Photography", New York, 1996, no. 9
Keith F. Davis, "An American Century of Photography, from Dry-Plate to Digital", Kansas City, 1999, no. 436
Nicholas Nixon, "The Brown Sisters", New York, 1999, 2002, 2008 and 2014, unpaginated
Suzanne Lange, "Degrees of Stillness: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection", Hamburg, 2001
Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, "Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph", London, 2003
Katherine A. Bussard, "So The Story Goes", Chicago, 2006
Sarah Hermanson Meister, "Nicholas Nixon: Forty Years", New York, 2014
Philip Gefter, Sandra S. Phillips, Ulrike Schneider, "About Face", San Francisco, 2014, page 112
Kim Beil, "The Grain of the Present", San Francisco, 2017, pages 39, 242–51

In July of 1975 Nicholas Nixon was visiting his wife’s family when he decided to take his first photograph of his wife, Bebe (née Brown), and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie. The resulting black-and-white photograph is striking: four young women, dressed casually, look directly at the camera while standing pale and luminous against a backdrop of trees and lawn.

Nixon photographed the Brown sisters each year, creating one of photography’s most poignant bodies of work. Each portrait is made with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera on a tripod and is captured on a black-and-white-film negative. When Nixon’s first solo exhibition opened in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art, the first two photographs were included in a show that focused primarily on exploring the built and natural environment. Despite sharply contrasting in terms of subject matter and vantage points, the promise of the series was undeniable.

A story of sisterhood emerges throughout the portraits, with a hand grasping a sister’s waist, an arm slung casually over a shoulder and their arms interlinked in an embrace. The series has two constants: the sisters always appear in the same order and jointly select an image representing a given year. The captions are short—marking the year and the location—and thus preserving their anonymity. Despite being the photographer hiding behind the lens and involved in the family as husband and brother-in-law, Nixon is nearly invisible across the entire series. He only appears in shadow within the seaside portrait of 1984 and the colder scene from 1996, where the sisters are shown wearing wool sweaters and a jacket.

While Nixon printed the negatives strictly as contact prints for a quarter of a century—thus retaining their size, level of detail and tone—he eventually came to appreciate the value of making larger prints of the series by producing twenty-by-twenty-four-inch enlargements. The resulting difference is, arguably, largely experiential: “the larger prints may sacrifice the intimacy of the smaller scale, but one can appreciate them from a distance that stands in for a distance in time, the remove of the viewer’s suggesting the sisters’ own remove from their younger selves.”

The series was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014 and Sarah Hermanson Meister writes: “We grow older along with these women, yet we are confronted with four lives we will never know through the eyes of a fifth. And in the space created through that ignorance, we find the potential for understanding the series as a work of art”. Throughout this intimate series, we notice the passage of time as we observe these women age. Their physical appearance evolves and they lose some of their initial candour. Yet, aging does not define them. Their portraits ultimately are a celebration of life and the enduring power of family ties.

The photographs featured in the present lot were printed in various years: 1995, 2000, 2002, 2005–2012 and 2014–2017.