The Brown sisters, 1990

Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947, Nicholas Nixon obtained a degree in American Literature in 1969. After completing his graduate studies in Photography at the University of New Mexico, he combined his classes as a photography professor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston with his work as a professional photographer. His interest in portraiture and documentary photography is captured in well-known series such as The Brown Sisters (1999-2012) and People with AIDS (1991), which denote the influence of great artists like Walker Evans.

Since 1976, the year he held his first solo show at the MoMA in New York, his work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums. He has also won a number of awards for his work, including two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, in 1977 and 1986, and the National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship on three occasions (1976, 1980 and 1987). In 1999 the Museum of Modern Art in New York published a catalogue of the first twenty-five photographs in the Brown Sisters series. He has also published the following books: Photographs from One Year (1983), Pictures of People (1988), People with AIDS (1991), School (1998), Nicholas Nixon (2003), Home: Nicholas Nixon (2004) and Live Love Look Last (2009). Nixon’s photographs can be found in prestigious collections around the world, such as those of the MoMA in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

Leyre Bozal