Time Stays, We Go

I just finished working on a remarkable set of photographs. They are the group of 48 portraits known collectively as The Brown Sisters, technically the work of Nicholas Nixon. I use that qualification because it would be remiss not to mention that all like all portrait photography, this group perhaps more then most, is the collaborative work of the photographer and his subject, in this case the photographer's wife Bibi Brown Nixon, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie.  

The photographs, one per year of the four women together, without break, span the years 1975 through 2022. 

I have heard it said it was the sisters who decided in 2022 to bring an end to the series, as they did not want the project to conclude with the death of one of them. 

Therefore, the collection of photographs currently displayed on the walls of The Art Institute of Chicago, is the complete, definitive set.  

Matting and framing these pictures inspired me to contemplate the inevitable; that is, all of us lucky enough to have been given the chance to live through many decades, have also been given the opportunity to grow old. 

It shouldn't come as a surprise that like many people, I feel a little ambivalent about that.

In an interview, Nick Nixon observed that we are all aware of the passage of time, at least from a philosophical standpoint. However, in the day-to-day course of living our lives, we haven't a clue.

I might add, that is until we see a recent photograph of ourselves.

It was a little jarring to see these pictures all together for the first time as the Brown sisters are my contemporaries, the three oldest and I were born in the same decade. I fall in age between Laurie, the third sister, and Mimi, the youngest who was born in 1960. 

I first became aware of this project when I was a student of photography back in the late seventies. The first two photographs were published in a book that accompanied an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. The book was written, and the show assembled in 1978 by the influential curator of photography, John Szarkowski. It was one of the first books on photography I bought.

Szarkowski, as much a taste maker as anyone in the history of the medium, championed among others, street photographers such as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston, all of whose work displayed a cool, dispassionate view of the world. I'm leaving out perhaps the most famous of the group, Diane Arbus, who was an outlier among them in that respect as her work was anything but cold and dispassionate. Incidentally one of her pictures graces the cover of Szarkowski's book.

There is a certain coolness to those early iterations of The Brown Sisters as well. which makes them fit in with much of the spirit of Mirrors and Windows. Not your typical family photographs, in the first five pictures of the series, Nixon stood the sisters in a row in front of his 8 x 10" view camera much as if they were in a police lineup, sporting expressions to match. 

That changed abruptly in the 1980 entry where the eldest sister Bibi, has both arms wrapped around Laurie to her left. In turn, Laurie, who up to this point appeared to be the most aloof of the four, places her left hand tenderly around the forearm of her older sister. In this portrait, for the first time Nixon moves his camera in on his subjects so they fill the entire frame. Instead of lining up equidistant from the lens, the sisters overlap one another, each at a slightly different distance from the camera. All four gaze into the lens intently as they had not before, and even a trace of a smile can be seen on each of their faces. In this, perhaps the most intimate portrait of the entire series, it seems the sisters have finally become one with the project.

With work like this I think it's best not to know too much of the backstory, allowing the photographs to speak for themselves. What I will say is that Nixon would make about ten exposures every session and allow the sisters to decide which image would represent the group. I also know the sisters allowed the photographer one major concession, that is to keep the order in which they appear in the photographs consistent throughout the series. 

So, from left to right we have Heather, Mimi, Bibi and finally Laurie. The only time that formula was broken was the 2020 entry, the year of the Pandemic, when it wasn't possible for the four to get together in one place. Instead, each sister's image is taken off the computer screen and arranged in a grid, Zoom style, on the photo negative used to make the prints.

While imposing the order of the subjects seems contrived, it works as keeping simple things like that consistent, makes everything else all the more apparent.

Whether they be family photo albums or published photos of celebrities, we've all seen photographs taken over a period of years that document people growing older. It took me a while to figure out what separates this series from other photographic records of aging. 

Then it came to me.

Generally speaking, photographs that span a person's life are made with a variety of equipment common at the time, lighting, printing materials, and most important, the photographers themselves. On top of that, fashions change usually making it easy to date a picture by what the subject is wearing, their hairstyle, and even their pose, styles of which vary over the years. 

Consequently, old photographs by their nature tend to look old on their own, so when we typically see a picture of someone made say, fifty years ago, by nature we expect them to appear different than they do today.

None of that is true here.

In the Brown Sisters series, besides the consistent positioning of his subjects, Nixon uses the same camera, film stock, processing, and printing technique throughout the project. As the prints are made to archival standards unlike prints we typically see in a photo album, the nearly fifty-year old vintage prints in this series show no signs of deterioration such as stains or fading; they look no different than the ones made practically yesterday.

Despite a few fashion accessories such as the appearance of an alligator logo stiched onto a polo shirt, or a flip phone holster that scream a particular decade, there are few hints that place these photographs in any specific time.

The only thing that dates them are the sisters.

Which makes the aging of Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie all the more stunning.

If this project were only about aging, we'd look at it for a few moments, say how interesting, then move on. What makes this work so compelling and memorable is that it is the story of the dynamics of one family, of the bonds that holds its members together, of more general themes such as love, kinship and forgiveness, and in the end, of the medium of photography itself, its possibilities and its drawbacks.

It takes an extraordinary group of people to pull off a project like this. The fact that all four sisters showed up together to participate in this project every year for nearly fifty years is nothing short of remarkable.

What's the big deal, you may ask, they're family after all. 

My point exactly.

Nixon claims that being an only child attracted him to the idea of exploring the relationships of a large family. I can relate having been raised as an only child, (I hadn't met my half-sister Eva until I was an adult.)

As such I've been particularly interested in the dynamics of big families and can honestly say that for of the vast majority of large families I've known intimately, including those of two wives and my own extended family, the mere act of gathering every sibling together in the same place, every year for forty-eight consecutive years, would by itself have been a non-starter. Even more remarkable is subjecting each family member to being photographed together in a photographic format that requires a good deal of patience, and is less than forgiving, especially to those of us beyond a certain age.

All it would take would be one individual, driven by some conflict, either petty or otherwise saying "no, not this year", to grind the whole thing to a halt.

One other piece of backstory I'll share is that in 2018, Nixon abruptly retired from his long-held post as professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design after allegations surfaced of inappropriate behavior with his students, thereby "violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender." I'll let you fill in the sordid details yourself.

One can imagine that if anything would have put an end to the project, perhaps even the Nixons' marriage, that might have been it. Nonetheless, the group of five got together to create four more entries after that episode.

As I mentioned above, the project really took off after that 1980 photograph when the four sisters appear to have taken over the reins of the project. From that point on, the poses vary, the women relate to one another differently, and the expressions change from photograph to photograph.  

It's tempting to attribute personalities to each of the sisters, even though we know them only superficially through their portraits. For me, through their facial expressions and body language, Heather appears the most vulnerable of the four while Laurie seems the most independent. Bibi the eldest seems to be the most loving and caring, as one might expect. Mimi the youngest, is the hardest to pin down as her appearance changes the most throughout the series. In the first few pictures she was still an adolescent and looked the part. In one photograph she sports a punk haircut, in another she is pregnant, the only obvious appearance of fertility in the entire series. But as the youngest, she does seem to be the object of the most attention from the other three. 

Of course I could be dead wrong in those assumptions. Part of that is a result of the imposition of the consistent order in which the sisters appear in each photograph. The two middle sisters in age are placed at either end of the group resulting in their inability to be in physical contact with each another. This makes them appear to be the most distant twosome of the group. In the middle, the alpha and the omega of the sisters, Bibi and Mimi by contrast are in close enough proximity to everyone else, to appear more connected to the entire group.

The story told in the pictures isn't complete as no story in photographs can ever be complete. As such The Brown Sisters displays the limitations of the medium of photography as much as the wonder of it.

They say that beauty is only skin deep. If that's true, so is aging. Naturally that applies only in a superficial sense. Non-superficial inner beauty is difficult (but not impossible) to capture in a photograph. In much the same way, a person may physically look old, but their spirit may be as young as that of a teenager. That can come across in photographs as it does here, especially in the case of Bibi, the eldest sister, as demonstrated by the constant gleam in her eye, not to mention perpetually keeping her hair long and flowing, well into her seventies.

What also can be easily conveyed in pictures is the feelings these women have for one another. Unless they are trained actors, which I have no reason to believe they are, the love they share for each other has been apparent in the pictures I'd say from the 1980 iteration until the last picture in the series from 2022.

As I said at the top, this is a remarkable, and I'll add here, life affirming body of work.

The Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon and Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie Brown, will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until August, 2024.