Looking at Nicholas Nixon’s Forty-Third Portrait of the Brown Sisters

In July of 1975, Nicholas Nixon took his first photograph of his wife, Bebe (née Brown), and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie. At the time, Bebe was twenty-five, and the others were twenty-three, fifteen, and twenty-one, respectively. Nixon has taken a photo of the Brown sisters every year since, and the images have accumulated into one of photography’s most affecting bodies of work. In this year’s portrait, Nixon’s forty-third, the sisters are sixty-eight, sixty-six, fifty-eight, and sixty-four, yet the tenor and the particular formal characteristics of the photographs have barely changed in four decades. Facing forward and sequenced exactly as she was every time before, each sister addresses the camera with deliberate scrutiny. The captions for these works include just the year and the location—in this case, Truro, Massachusetts—leaving the viewer only the women’s expressions and bodies with which to speculate about the details of their identities, their relationships, and their lives. As we’ve come to expect, there is a quiet gesture of familial affinity here: Heather’s hand rests on Mimi’s shoulder. In earlier portraits, one sister’s arm might have encircled another’s waist, or a cheek brushed a forehead. Such tenderness might at first seem sentimental, but Nixon (whose exhibit “Persistence of Vision” opens on Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston) is from a generation of photographers, and, in particular, of portraitists, like his peers Emmet Gowin and Sally Mann, who did not have to choose whether they were photographers or artists, and who—before the conceptual premises of image-making were thrown into question by digital technologies, professionalization, and postmodernism—still revered the medium as deeply humanistic. Today, we are bombarded by images of women every day—in entertainment, in advertising, in art, on social media—but depictions of women who are visibly aging remain too rare. Stranger still, women whom we know to have aged are often made to appear as if they have not, suspended in a state of quixotic youthfulness, verging on the bionic. But Nixon—who photographed Ophelia Dahl, the daughter of the children’s-book author Roald Dahl, for this week’s issue of The New Yorker—is interested in these women as subjects, not just as images, and he’s committed to documenting the passage of time, not defying it. Year by year, his portraits of the Brown sisters have come to mark the progress of all of our lives.