using an 810-view camera, chronicling the density
and complexity of urban development from high
vantage points—work that positioned Nixon square-
ly inside of a rising movement of young photogra-
phers documenting the ‘‘social landscape.’’
In 1975, curator Bill Jenkins assembled ten artists,
Nixon among them, whose work exemplified this
new movement in documentary photography, in a
George Eastman House group exhibition titledNew
Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Land-
scape. Other photographers included in the exhibi-
tion were Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and
Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, John Schott,
Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. While it was
not the first major exhibition for all of these artists
(both Robert Adams’sThe New Westand Lewis
Baltz’sNew Industrial Parkspreceded theNew Topo-
graphicsexhibition), it was the first time the working
methods and collective identity of the New Topo-
graphics, as the group came to be known, were de-
clared in a formal, public way. The exhibition was
seminal in that it placed a startling new approach
within the traditions of documentary and landscape
photography while at the same time clearly outlining
a radical departure from those traditions. While
artists such as Ansel Adams were producing epic
portraits of an untouched and idealized ‘‘nature,’’
the New Topographics were documenting the pro-
found reconfiguration of the American environment
in areas of concentrated human activity: industrial
parks, chemical plants, expressway loops, housing
tracts, and shopping centers. As a generation of art-
ists who had never experienced the natural landscape
without also experiencing its counterforce—industri-
alism—the New Topographics assumed the task of
re-claiming the terrain of landscape photography by
focusing on the prosaic and profoundly ‘‘man-
altered landscape.’’ They aimed to render their sub-
jects without ceremony or sentimentality, adopting
an overtly ascetic approach to their images (taking as
their model real estate and survey photographs). In
framing the landscape, they actively rejected the
‘‘subjective’’ themes of beauty and idealism and
chose, instead, the ‘‘objective’’ study of place—geo-
graphical, cultural, and political. The New Topo-
graphics artists worked to minimize the role of
style, and instead strove to see the environment
clearly and wholly as it truly appears. Many of
them worked in series as a way of equalizing the
value of individual images and democratizing a sys-
tem of visual meaning that can subordinate its sub-
jects to authorial control and isolate subjects from
cultural context.
By the time of theNew Topographicsexhibition,
Nixon had already begun to apply this ideology to
photographs of human subjects. Nixon’s work with
human subjects (e.g.,School,The Brown Sisters,
Pictures of People) melds the technical precision
and scrutiny of the large format view camera with
the emotional and cultural specificity of the snap-
shot, a technique that has become his trademark.
Speaking about his role in the continuum of great
view camera photographers, Nixon has said:
I’m honored to be using the same methods as Atget, as
Walker Evans. I want to honor what is possible. I’d like
to go deeper, get closer, know more, be more intense
and more intimate. I’ll fail, but I’m honored to be in the
ring trying. I’d like to go deeper than Stieglitz did about
his marriage. It’s arrogant, but I’d like to try.
(Ollman 1999)
To subjects at close range, this format is, if not
unkind, certainly unromantic in its relentless atten-
tion to discrete variations in human surfaces: pores
and wrinkles and hairs achieve stunning promi-
nence in Nixon’s photographs, almost as if he
believes it possible to uncover the physical sub-
stance of what is ineffable and elusive in human
identity and relationships. In 1975, Nixon pro-
duced the first image of his ongoing seriesThe
Brown Sisters, which chronicles his wife, filmmaker
and journalist Bebe Nixon, and her three sisters in
a series of annual portraits, one selected for each
year. Included in its nascence in the 1978 exhibition
Mirrors and Windowsat the Museum of Modern
Art, New York,The Brown Sistersis one of Nix-
on’s most recognized achievements. The fact that
the images are produced as a series, always com-
posed in the same way—the camera always at eye
level, the four women arranged in the same order—
connects each image to the others and plots them
along a temporal trajectory, prompting the viewer
to examine the four women, not as figures sus-
pended in a single ‘‘decisive moment,’’ but as the
collective site of an ongoing and changing narra-
tive; across the series, uniformity gives rise to var-
iation, and the relationships and identities of the
four sisters are evidenced by the slow, steady trans-
formation of this human landscape.
Throughout the 1980s, Nixon’s attention encom-
passed a wide variety of human subjects, his photo-
graphs striving to penetrate the broadest possible
spectrum of societal issues. His images of ‘‘porch
life’’ in Kentucky (from the seriesPictures of Peo-
ple, 1988) document the starkness and lyricism of
quotidian family life in an economically-depressed
swath of rural America. Notable in this series is the
1982 imageCovington, Kentucky, which shows a
young boy on a porch basking in a patch of sun-
light, his arms outstretched and his head thrownNIXON, NICHOLAS