In photography, with a high-tech zoom lens, going from far to near can take no more than a millisecond. But then, it can be a journey of many years — as it has been for the eminent American photographer Nicholas Nixon.
Having had one-man exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, among other eminent venues, Nixon is in the midst of his 10th one-man show at New York’s Zabriskie Gallery.
On view through Jan. 27, the show is called “Close and Far.” Though it contains much of his latest work, it also represents the progression of a career that began with the purchase of an old-fashioned Deardorff view camera in Chicago more than a quarter-century ago.
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Born in Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and the University of New Mexico, and now a longtime resident of Boston, Nixon, 56, is best known for his intimate pictures. They have included highly empathetic, caring and affectionate series of photos of geriatric patients near death, AIDS patients, as well as a more recent and sensually intimate series, “Couples,” studies of sexual union that have everything to do with love and nothing to do with pornography.
Best known for sister photos
He is perhaps best known for the arresting series of annual photos he has taken of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Laurie and Mimi. They were the subject of a Museum of Modern Art exhibit and book, “The Brown Sisters.” With the “Close” portion of his new show, Nixon has moved in even closer, to an extraordinary degree of intimacy. One image is of Bebe’s sweater-and-skirt-clad waistline. Another is of a curling sweep of blond hair strands belonging to a “B.S.” of Brookline, Mass.
Others include a very close view of the flesh of an arm, such as the arm’s owner might view it, and a similarly close image of two people’s arms. And there is intimate nudity.
“Most of the people in these pictures are people I know, not the strangers of the past,” Nixon said. “There’s an older couple: a world-class botanist who’s retired; his wife is a schoolteacher. They live in Truro on Cape Cod [near a nude beach] and just like to be naked a lot. Their physical openness leads to psychological openness.”
An uncanny aspect of the pictures is how much knowledge they seem to impart of their subjects, even though one is looking at only a few square inches of flesh.
“It’s always been my idea that if you pay loving and intense attention to 100 square inches of what’s on the film,” Nixon said, “with a little luck, it will mean more than just that.” The other part of the show, “Far,” is jarring, because it’s a series of long-distance shots of Boston buildings and cityscape, including expansive views of the huge “Big Dig” expressway excavations. They seem an anomaly in the context of Nixon’s work. But not so. “I photographed buildings when I first moved to Boston in the 1970s,” he said. “They weren’t published in a book, but they were the first exhibition I ever had, a little show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976.”
A collection of his new building photos will be on view at Boston’s Bernard Toale Gallery through Feb. 29.
“I looked at it as a kind of landscape,” he said of his original building pictures. “I climbed all over the city. For the first time, I began using only the 8-by-10 view camera. They were the first pictures I was proud of.”
After a while, he tired of playing King Kong with a camera.
“When I got tired of the city, I came down to the ground and started photographing it from the ground level instead of way up,” he said. “And then day by day, without my knowing it, people started to creep in. At first they were sort of little ants, and then they were an inch big and over the course of the years they became the main show.” Culminating in an almost microscopic study of a woman’s lovely hair.
A change in perspective
But two summers ago, intrigued by the challenge of taking penetrating pictures with a long lens, which tends to flatten subjects and remove depth, Nixon bought an enormous 800 mm lens.
“I got it to learn how to use it,” he said. Hence a long-range view of traffic moving on Albany Street down toward Boston Harbor and another of the city reflected in the glass facade of a high-rise office building, and another showing the Big Dig as a huge incision across the body of Boston.
“It’s like photographing somebody while they’re having an operation,” he said. “Part of them is functioning just fine, but you also get to see all the nerves and muscles of this part that’s being repaired.”
Yet into these long-view cityscapes has crept something more Nixonian, if you will: people.
“There’s one with a bunch of people walking across Boston Common,” he said, “maybe 20 people. There’s another one, a bunch of trees, with two people walking down the street. That’s what interests me now: being up high and having human stuff happening.”
A future glimpse of hair or arm cannot be too long coming.
And certainly we shall have another look at the essence of humanity — and aging — with his next Brown Sisters picture, the 30th, to be taken in November.