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| Photo By Nicholas Nixon |
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The Brown Sisters of Cincinnati have been annual subjects for photographer Nicholas Nixon (whose shadow is part of the image). This gelatin print is from 1984. Nixon's wife, Bebe Brown Nixon, is second from right.
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Photographer Nicholas Nixon says, "People are self-conscious at first. But it gets better as we kind of dance with each other ... it's like a date, in a way. We get more comfortable together. The best pictures are usually the last ones." A selection of Nixon's richly filled black-and-white photographs,
The Human Experience, is presently on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum
.
Nixon's work has the superb detail that only a large negative can provide, but in its supple immediacy suggests a smaller, hand-held camera. He uses, in fact, an 8-by-10 inch view camera, which requires setting up for a picture and is, surely, a bear to lug around. How and why does he do it?
"Because I have a strong desire to -- and I do it every day," he says. His first ventures into photography, as a college student, were with a 35 millimeter camera, a Leica. But admiration for Walker Evans' work, among others, led him first to 4-by-5 and then to what seems to be his fully compatible format, 8-by-10. Experi-ments with larger negatives only turned him back. His photographs, contact prints, are not hampered by the distortion of enlargement.
What about color? Black-and-white prints, for all their beauty, are almost an anachronism in today's color-drenched world. "Every year or so I buy some 8-by-10 color negatives and try it ...," Nixon says, but his sentence trails off. It's plain the experiment never pans out. As it shouldn't, for someone whose mastery of the marvelous depths of black-and-white seems complete.
At Massachusetts College of Art in Boston Nixon teaches a required course in 8-by-10 view cameras; students learn other cameras in other courses. What does he think about digital? "It's the future. People will do terrific things in it, and it's maybe better for color now. But I'm not interested in the way (this work) looks. So much is changed -- veracity is lost. The quality of witness is compromised."
The quality of witness is never in doubt in The Human Experience, where Nixon's empathy to his subjects is an integral element. He works in series, spending a year or two exploring a theme. The CAM exhibition draws from several, including Front Porch Pictures, Old People, People with Aids, School and The Brown Sisters.
The Brown Sisters has attracted much attention and appears here for the first time with 30 years of annual pictures of his Cincinnati-born wife and her sisters. In 1999 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the first 25 years, publishing a hardcover book in conjunction with the exhibition; a version also has been shown at Harvard University's Fogg Museum. Bebe Brown Nixon and her three sisters, daughters of Fred and Sally Brown, grew up in Cincinnati and retain ties here. In the pictures they appear always in the same left-to-right order (their idea originally, says Nixon), the series as a whole becoming a remarkable record of growing maturity and strength, as well as their bonds to each other. The photographer and his camera appear, now and then, in shadow form.
The series The Brown Sisters is about time, inherently, Nixon has said. Time is an unspoken component in much of his work, including the sense of elapsed time. "When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, (unlike) early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large."
Relationships -- between the people photographed, with the photographer himself, and the relationships of form within the pictures -- are continuing subjects. Narratives hang in the air. In "Plant City, Florida," from the Front Porch series, a woman reaches over to touch the face of another woman; a figure can be seen through the scrim of the screen door. In "Chestnut Street, Louisville" a picture in the CAM show and also in the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural reopening photography exhibit, a little boy hugs a littler boy, hugger and huggee looking at the camera with vastly differing expressions. These pictures are innocent collusions between subjects and photographer, taking place when the subjects are easy before the camera.
Nixon has been linked with Diane Arbus, whose famous photographs of society's outsiders have comparable implied stories. Nixon's interest in the entire area of the photograph is different, however. Almost every square inch of his work is alive. "She's like a huntress," he says of Arbus. "I'm more like the artist guy, wanting all the details right."
The artist guy, coming out of the tradition of Evans and Edward Weston, continues to push the envelope within his self-imposed boundaries. He has returned to an early subject, cityscapes from a high vantage point, but now using a long lens. "Difficult to use so that it's not a cliché, but I'm getting pictures packed with detail, like jigsaw puzzles."
He's also working on a project called Threatened Lives, showing "people in hospice care, people with cancer, kids with cystic fibrosis." How does he know when a series is finished? "When it gets too easy, and when I have enough pictures that the series takes on form."
Nixon's attention to form produces eloquent photographs.
THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE: PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS NIXON is on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through May 1.
