Nicholas Nixon began his series of group portraits of the Brown sisters – Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie – in 1975. Nixon had met the oldest of the Brown sisters, Bebe, in 1970, and they married in 1971. He first photographed the sisters at a family gathering in 1974 but was unsatisfied with the result. Trying again the following year, the portrait he made of the quartet in 1975 proved the starting point for one of the most remarkable continuing photographic series of the 20th and 21st centuries.

At the t.mes , the sisters were fifteen (Mimi), twenty-one (Laurie), twenty-three (Heather), and twenty-five (Bebe). They agreed to gather annually for a portrait, and would pose in the same order. Pictured from left to right are always Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. Additionally, it was decided that they would jointly select a single image to represent a given year.

Nixon has made photographs of the four sisters each year since 1975, working with an 8-by-10-inch view camera and contact-printing his negatives to capture the highest level of detail and to document his subjects as completely as possible. The only year that the sisters were not able to gather in person for the annual portrait was 2020, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The portrait sitting, therefore, took place over a Zoom session, with each sister situated in a quadrant of the photograph.

The portraits taken in 1975 and 1976 were included in John Szarkowski’s 1976 exhibition Longer Views: 40 Photographs by Nick Nixon at The Museum of Modern Art. This was Nixon’s first solo exhibition and, fittingly, was the debut of images from his then-new project. Szarkowski also included Brown Sisters photographs in his important 1978 exhibition, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. In 1998 MoMA published a monograph devoted to The Brown Sisters; in 2014, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the project, The Museum of Modern Art updated this monograph to include the most recent annual additions.

Seen in its current entirety, the 48 images presented here offer a meditation on the passage of t.mes , and on the unique capability of photography to freeze individual instants. Nixon, in collaboration with his subjects, has created a highly detailed and compelling multi-decade portrait through 48 specific moments in t.mes .

At the t.mes of this writing, more than 20 international institutions – The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston; and La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, among them – own complete sets of this series.

Nicholas Nixon-The Brown Sisters from Pier 24 Photography on Vimeo.