The Sound of Time

Every Year For 40 Years, These Sisters Gathered Together For A Photo
By: Katherine Brooks
Source: Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/04/brown-sisters_n_6257612.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

        Photographer Nicholas Nixon, from at age twenty-six, began photographing four sisters (the Brown sisters). The first picture he took of them never made it into his portfolio. The origins of the project started August of 1974, where he took his first image of the sisters, Bebe (25), Heather (23), Laurie (21), and Mimi (15), Bebe being his wife. Unsatisfied with the image, it was thrown away. A year after, however, giving it another attempt, Nixon was pleased with what he created. The second year, taking another picture in the event of Laurie's college graduation instilled the annual tradition that eventually led onto the project, in all its entirety, expressing the raw beauty of age, and "powerful expression of time" (Brooks, 1). It was the job of the sisters to select a single image each year, which they believed served as the nicest or rather most accurate representation of them within that year. Only two years into his project, the work was displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, while the full forty-year series lies there now until January four of 2015. Currently, the sisters meet once a year, holding onto the mere sentimentality of a concept. What adds slight mystery and pleasant depth into Nixon's project is his taciturnity on the subject, one of his few comments being "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it" (Brooks, 1).
        It is within the modern context of society that the concept of age holds within it such a negative significance and feeling of internal guilt and condemnation. And that is the reason why few people manage to find within this age such subtle beauty and a raw, rather despondent sense of life that cannot be described in any other form than sight, reminiscence, experience. Nixon has managed, through his work, to instill such feelings into the viewer in, arguably, all but one of the aforementioned forms. It is the silence the images manage to convey, seemings ever still and impressing, while at the same instant saying so much, with the sisters' subtle smirks and grins and solemn, even desolate expressions, holding onto no verbal explanation, having behind them much to be, much to say about the context of a year, time. And that is where time, one of the most abstract and intangible of concepts, manages to speak.

1975

 1978

 1988

 1999

 2014