Nixon was born in 1947 in
Detroit,
Michigan. Influenced by the photographs of
Edward Weston and
Walker Evans, he began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35 mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed
prints to be made directly from the large format negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said "When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large." His first solo exhibition was at the
Museum of Modern Art curated by
John Szarkowski in 1976. Nixon's early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at one of the most influential exhibitions of the decade,
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the
George Eastman House in 1975 which helped to define the
New Topographics genre. In the late nineties, Nixon returned to this subject matter to document Boston's changing urban landscape during the
Big Dig highway development project. In 1976, 1980, and 1987, Nixon was awarded
National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships. In 1977 and 1986, he was awarded
Guggenheim Fellowships. Nixon's subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in
nursing homes, the
blind, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work
People With AIDS, begun in 1987. Nixon recorded his subjects with meticulous detail in order to facilitate a connection between the viewer and the subject. In 1975, Nixon began his project,
The Brown Sisters consisting of a single portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters each year, consistently posed in the same left to right order. As of 2021, there are forty-seven portraits altogether. The series has been shown at the
St. Louis Art Museum,
Museum of Modern Art,
Harvard University's
Fogg Art Museum, the
Cincinnati Art Museum, the
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth the
National Gallery of Art, KBr Photography Center, Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona, and the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2010, the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized the exhibition "Nicholas Nixon: Family Album" which included "The Brown Sisters" series among other portraits of his wife Bebe, himself and his children Sam and Clementine. In 2021, The Galerie le Château d’Eau presented the first major exhibition of Nixon's work in France, an ambitious survey accompanied by an expanded catalog. Nixon gained a B.A. from the
University of Michigan in 1969 and an M.F.A from the
University of New Mexico in 1975. He worked as a part-time professor at the
Massachusetts College of Art and Design from 1975 until March 2018. ==Allegations of inappropriate behavior==