149 - Nixon Nicholas 3-book set: Live, Love, Look, Last & Close Far - 2010-2017. An early associate of the New Topographics movement, Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) achieved fame for his widely exhibited ongoing project The Brown Sisters (begun in 1975), for which he has made one black-and-white portrait per year of four sisters, one of whom is Nixon's wife. Nixon's Live, Love, Look Last brings together similarly intimate photographs from the past decade. Each of the series presented-Nixon's family, couples, Boston cityscapes and critically ill patients-originated as a project of its own, but Nixon soon realized that the four independent series collectively articulated his continual effort to simply render life's most intimate moments, and so has gathered them here. Nixon brings a moving candor to his sense of portraiture, and takes care to strike a balance between "on the one hand, getting the picture I want, and on the other, having (his subjects) like the experience. I don't want them to feel like I've taken anything they don't want to give me. "Unflinchingly honest in his approach, Nixon explores the relationships between individuals and their environment, and how these bonds are affected by birth and death. In Close Far, Nixon presents a dichotomous group of photos made with his signature large-format view camera, in this case one with an 11x14 inch negative. The first half of the book contains self-portraits, comprising in Nixon's words "sketches of an old man". Filled with anxiety, longing and contentment, these images chronicle the shapes, slopes and pores of Nixon's face. The second half of the book shows views of buildings in the densest part of Boston. Made from high within the buildings and with the same camera, these images without horizons do not gaze down upon but rather "through" the city. With the lens in the same orientation as his self-portrait photos, Nixon's results are remarkable for their richness of detail and complexity of form. This book accompanies a comprehensive retrospective based on around 200 photographs by Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947 in Detroit), who has produced one of the most powerful and personal photographic works of the past few decades. Nixon expresses himself in a poetic voice that is unmistakeable and profoundly original, unaffected by the pressure of contemporary artistic movements and closely connected to reality and life. He returns to the idea of art as an account that can be understood, shared and remembered, establishing a reflexive dialogue and creating a body of work that can trouble us, arouse desires, encourage thought, and transform us. Nixon's photographs can thus be associated with the tradition of documentary photography with a social focus. At the same time, Nixon's work offers a remarkable demonstration of how the traditional tools of photography - a large-format camera, black and white film and contact sheets - can be used to venture into previously unexplored artistic territories. The book offers a chronological survey based on the artist's most important series, concluding with the well-known group of the Brown Sisters that he has created over the past 40 years.