Best Site I've Found for Nixon

Lots of general overview

LINK

Nixon Summed Up

(his best known photo series) "series which show us again and again why his work with the slow, contemplative large format camera surprises and enthralls viewers. It is because the results are more than portraiture; large format has never been used in quite the way Nixon uses it. Technically, his photos are always thrillingly composed and lovingly detailed. Emotionally, his photos inhabit a world somewhere between the action click and the thoughtful composition, capturing fleeting but meaningful moments. His subjects' expressions combine a buoyant hopefulness with an ominous cognizance of human frailty. These qualities are what give his photographs their poignancy."

-New York Institute of Photography, Photographer's Spotlight

Nixon - People/Lovers

I found an interesting essay on NIXON being a contemporary "photodocumentary" photographer.

LINK: http://webhome.idirect.com/~gordwest/minweb/gwtexts/nixon/nixonweb.htm

Nicholas Nixon - Lovers

Nicholas Nixon, M.P., M.J., Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, 2000

Nicholas Nixon, M.C., P.G., Brookline, 2000

Nicholas Nixon, K.S., J.Z., Somerville, Massachusetts, 2000

Disturbing Similarity

Larry Fink Paris, France January 1996

Nicholas Nixon, Tom Moran January 1988

I have to say- there is a disturbing similarity between Fink's runway photos and Nixon's photographs of AIDS patients.

Nicholas Nixon, Tom Moran October 1987

Larry Fink Christian LaCroix Haute Couture, Paris, France, January 1996

Surely I'm not the only one who sees this.

Links: Nixon 1, Nixon 2, Fink 1, Fink 2

Depictions of the Elderly

Larry FinkNice, France July 1988

I came across this photo of Fink's, and was struck by the turn that it takes (at least in my mind) of his depiction of ordinary people. I posted earlier about his photos of families not being as intimate, as soft as Nixon's, but this photo changes my mind somewhat.

Nixon's most famous photos of the elderly depict patients in nursing homes, all seemingly in their last few days of life. There is a certain amount of truth to this, in confronting the issue of death in this way (he has certainly dealt with the issue in several projects over the years), but the photos are a little harsh, lacking in compassion perhaps. Fink's photo shows more hope, more life than Nixon's depictions of the elderly generally do.

Nicholas Nixon C.C., Boston, 1983

Links: Fink, Nixon

interesting thoughts by NIXON:
as taken from "Family Pictures"

Why do you use and 8x10 view camera?
I use it to get a contact print; it's no more complicated than that.
Sensuality seems to be prevelant in your work. What's that about?
It's just my pleasure---just me. It has to do with the way I love the contact print,
and what I love about people: their bodies, and gestures, their separateness, and
their eyes.
Also, there is alot of contact between people--touching and caressing--just physical stuff going on.
Partly thats what happened when I was there. But these are the moments I choose
to like. It's just my taste. It's what I love, and what I believe in intelectually, and
what I love to look at. It seems inexhaustible, and connected to other aspects of
culture and history that matter to me.
Aging is a major theme in your work. Is that something you've always been interested in?
Instinctively, yes. But it's not something that I'm methodically trying to prove or to
chronicle. It's simply part of my energy to be interested in things that are
ephemeral---the feeling that everybody's mortal.

Comparing Family Photos

Nicholas Nixon, Bebe and Sam (1995)

I was looking through Nixon's photos of his family, and Fink's photos of the Sabatine family at the birthday parties, and noticed something. While Fink's photos are certainly more candid than Nixon's, they seem far less intimate. He seems to have photographed as an outsider, peeking in at another family's celebration (which very well may be what he did). Nixon's photos of his family (in general) seem very posed, but yet they retain a sense of intimacy that Fink's photos of the birthday parties lack. Even in Fink's photo of himself with his daughter(?) Molly, the effect is harsh, quite unlike the softness of Nixon's photos.

Larry Fink, Self with Molly (1982)

Nicholas Nixon, Clem with Bebe (1996)

Links: Nixon, Fink 1, Fink 2

Thoughts on Nicholas Nixon:

"Once decried as another victimization of the person with AIDS, Nixon's photographs are now being reconsidered as historically important and aesthetically significant, as highly exceptional counterpoints to the by now entrenched iconography or the healthy and beautiful person with HIV/AIDS."
- A New York University literary review of People with Aids


(on his School series) "His pictures persuade us that we see individuals, not symptoms of a problem, or worse, heroes of a solution."
(Nixon's work) "embraces the idea that sympathetic photographs of ordinary... people can address the deepest human values."
- Peter Galassi, Chief Photography Curator at the Museum of Modern Art

The Human Condition

One thing that strikes me about both Larry Fink and Nick Nixon is the way they handle their subject matter (the human condition) with a gentle, human touch.  Whether it is Nixon's AIDs patients or Fink's boxers, the idea that these are individual, feeling, living, breathing people is always very apparent.  The sadness, the joy, the growth, everything thing about being human is in their work.

School

In the mid to late nineties, both Larry Fink and Nicholas Nixon published photos of grade school classrooms/students.

Larry Fink Cleveland School of the Arts 1998

Larry Fink Cleveland High School of the Arts 1995

Nicholas Nixon, from School 1998

Nicholas Nixon, from School 1998

Nixon spent nearly a year photographing at various schools, including Perkins School for the Blind and the Tobin School, among several others. This collection of photos was published in the book School in 1998 (coauthored by Robert Coles), and has become some of Nixon's most famous work.

Fink's photos were taken over the course of several years, and are often overlooked in favor of his more theatrical works.

"I know that I often fail – in the grand hope that a good one (photograph) might evoke everybody’s home – but I want to try anyway. It’s a way of making moments of whim, of feeling, have more shape than words could ever give them."

"I always look hard at whatever is in front of me. If I like what I see, I have to make a photograph of it. I just can’t help myself. That, and because I love them so, are why there are so many pictures of my home and my family."

Nixon talking about his Lodima Press Portfolio Book "Home" from 5B4. Link

"Can This Marraige Be Saved?"

An article published in The New York Times Magazine by Laurie Abraham on August 12, 2007 described a year-long couples therapy session given by psychologist Judith Coché. The photographs that accompanied the article (all taken by Nicholas Nixon) are of the couples it described (and of Coché) and were taken in Coché’s Philadelphia office.

[source: nytimes.com]

Nixon, People With AIDS

In 1986, Nicholas Nixon and his wife, Bebe, began the People With AIDS project in 1986. They intended to show honestly and compassionately what it is like to have AIDS, and how the disease affects family and friends of those afflicted. They wished to demonstrate why AIDS is "the most devastating social and medical issue of our time."



The most famous photographs in this series are those of Thomas Moran (above), though fourteen other individuals suffering from AIDS were also photographed.



When it was first shown in 1988, the series of work was seen as "one of the first and most controversial mainstream art exhibits on AIDS, becoming a kind of standard by which to measure dehumanizing, degrading representations of the disease." Several rights groups vehemently protested the photographs, stating that it only showed the negative side of AIDS, that it only showed death and despair. These groups wanted more diverse and more positive representations of people with the disease.

Today, however, this series is seen as historically important; they are described as a stark contrast to the abundance of images of happy and healthy people with AIDS. Perhaps they're a warning of the pain caused by the disease, or perhaps they were simply a documentation of a few people's lives.

as they died, NIXON

april 25, 2005

feb. 15, 2005

As They Died

Nicholas Nixon, study of illness and dying. He photographed people and thier loved ones as they went through the stages of dying from terminal illness. Some photographs were taken days before the subject passed.

Since 1975, Nicholas Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters producing a single photograph each year featuring the sisters in the same order (youngest to oldest from left to right) though at various locations along the East Coast. From left to right we see Heather, Mimi, Bebe (Nixon’s wife), and Laurie as they change and grow from year to year in image after image. The Brown Sisters series functions as an ever-evolving portrait of the siblings and their relationship to one another over time.
Although best known for his ongoing portrait series of his wife and her sisters, Nicholas Nixon addresses many traditional themes of documentary photography – the family, the elderly, the ill – essentially pictures of people of all and any type. Using an 8-by-10-inch camera, Nixon captures the essential textures, tonalities, and expressions of the people he photographs. The father/daughter portrait Yazoo City, Mississippi is from a series Nixon made of people on their front porches.

Link

Nixon - His Family

Bebe and I, 1997

Clementine and I, 1997

Bebe and Clementine, 1986

Sam, Bebe and Clementine, 1989

Clementine, 1986

Sam and Clementine, 1995

Nixon has said...

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.

Link

Nixon Bio

Nicholas Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received an MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Nixon has worked as an independent photographer since 1974. He is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowships, and a Massachusetts Council for the Arts “New Works” Grant. He currently is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Nixon has been exploring portraiture and social photography since the 1970s. Although best known for The Brown Sisters, he has created several other series noted for their humanity and restrained emotion. Nixon often spends a year or two exploring his chosen theme: among his subjects have been nursing home residents (Old People), AIDS patients in their final months (People with Aids), and Boston schoolchildren (School).

His photographs have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has published many books of photographs, including: Nicholas Nixon (2003); A City Seen (2001); The Brown Sisters (1999); School: Photographs from Three Schools (1998); People with AIDS (1991); Family Pictures (1991); Nicholas Nixon: Pictures of People (1988); and Photographs from One Year (1983). Nixon’s photographs are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

From Link