The Brown Sisters, East Greenwich, Rhode Island (from the series the Brown Sisters)

Nicholas Nixon married his wife Beverly Brown, known as Bebe, in 1971 and first photographed her with her three sisters at a family gathering in August of 1974. He discarded that portrait but in July of 1975 he tried again and kept the negative, which became the beginning image in his annual series The Brown Sisters. The sisters appear in the same order in each of the pictures, from left to right: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The sisters jointly select which of Nixon’s exposures will be chosen to represent each year. The portraits are made with black-and-white film in an eight-by-ten-inch view camera on a tripod and the prints were made as contact prints for about the first twenty-five years, after which the artist also began producing the portraits as twenty-by-twenty-four-inch enlargement prints.