At some point each year, Bebe (third from left) and her sisters Heather, Mimi, and Laurie (again from left) gather at a family event and pose, always in the same order.
The annual portraits Nixon has made since 1975 of his wife Beverly (Bebe) Brown and her three sisters are by far the most extensive of his serial projects. At some point each year, Bebe (third from left) and her sisters Heather, Mimi, and Laurie (again from left) gather at a family event and pose, always in the same order. Subtle relations among the sisters suggest themselves in each composition—here, for instance, a motherly assurance in the way Bebe circles Mimi's waist and Laurie's shoulder with her arms—but it is above all the changes over time that fascinate us: shifts in hairstyle, skin texture, and sense of self. As we have seen elsewhere on this tour (with Stieglitz and Sander, for instance), "composite" portraiture constitutes an important aspect of modernist photography. In the case of the Brown Sisters portraits, the process is open-ended, pointed always toward the next encounter; yet the cumulative effect of these time-lapse images is intensely commemorative, underscoring as it does our own mortality.