Nicholas Nixon was 26 years old when he started to photograph the Brown Sisters. When Nicholas Nixon was visiting his wife’s family, he was on a whim and asked his wife and her three sisters whether he could take a photo. He then took the first portrait of these four sisters, but ended up discarding it as intrinsically uninteresting. In the summer of 1975, the first portrait that appeared in the gallery The Brown Sister, showed four fresh-faced young ladies who are staring at the camera in their summer shirts and pants. Nicholas Nixon suggested that they lined up in the same order as the year before. Thus the project began and has spanned almost his whole career. The sisters were 25 (Bebe), 23 (Heather), 21 (Laurie) and 15 (Mimi) in July of 1975 and Bebe is Nixon’s wife. Throughout this photo gallery, we watch these ladies age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience.
