Nicholas Nixon

Photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a career out of capturing intimate portraits. Working primarily in large format black-and-white film, Nixon has taken as his subject everything from his wife and her three sisters (whom he has been photographing annually since 1975) to porch life down south to Boston schools. Drawing inspiration from the medium’s modernist masters like Edward Weston and Walker Evans, Nixon largely works with a large format 8x10 camera rather than shooting 35mm film, arguing that it enabled him to capture “greater chunks” of time.

Nixon has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His work is also included in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.