From Friendly Desperation: Nicholas Nixon, the Brown Sisters, and a Four-Decade Appointment

In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of The Brown Sisters: Forty Years, to coincide with the museum’s publication of a book of the same name by photographer Nicholas Nixon.

Nixon’s project is as simple as it is profound: he’s made a group portrait of these siblings every year since 1975. As the decades have passed, the series has been shown in galleries around the world; author Susan Minot, in a piece in the New York Times, describes the impact the images can have on viewers:

The cumulative effect is dizzying and powerful. When 36 prints were exhibited in a gallery in Granada, Spain, viewers openly wept.

— Susan Minot

Here’s Nixon himself describing the work, as well as a look at what he’s achieved:

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Also in the series Magic vs. the Bony Guy: Six Lifespan Projects That Speak to Us All: 

• Five Guys, One Cockroach: The Copco Lake Five Project 
• Because I Make Up the Rules: a Life and a Death in Polaroids 
• A Desperate Swipe at Immortality: Marc Tasman’s 10-Year Polaroid Self-Portrait Project
• This is the Power of Time: Father and Son Across Three Decades