gowin and nixon

Currently there's a Nicholas Nixon exhibition (Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years) at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. There's also an Emmet Gowin exhibition in my home town of Kansas City. The men represent two of my most adored photographers.

Nixon was asked by the folks at Fraenkel to talk about an image that has had an impact on him as a photographer. He chose one by Gowin. 

And here are his words:

Emmet Gowin’s picture "Edith & Rennie Booher, Danville, Virginia, 1970" is a modern version of a story told in many languages and mediums all through history. Youth and age and time and death, transience contained within a frame. A cautionary tale. It tells us to live fully while we can.

And yet.

Edith is so present in the moment that we are stunned by her force.

What she is offering is her whole strong self, meeting Emmet and the viewer with a loving fierceness, her physical body a testament to this time, this place, this light. Her regard is at once electric and kind.

The bed behind is sagging, covered with a striped sheet and clothes to be tended to.  The picture on the dresser of a man and woman (Edith’s parents? The old lady’s children?) confers continuity, approval. These are the familiar artifacts of ordinary life.

That her grandmother seems to be already passing out of the world makes the story ancient, heartbreaking, and wise. Rennie is as ephemeral as Edith is present. The frame of Gowin’s photograph has unified their being in the same moment in time.

The grandmother has already lost her identity as she moves, well loved we assume, off the stage. Edith is here, now beautiful, sexual, and strong, and at the same time we see her as a timeless player of a drama that most of us play throughout our lives.

Until it’s over.

idris khan and nicholas nixon

Idris Khan created "every…Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters, 2004" by layering the portraits Nicholas Nixon made of over a twenty-year period of his wife and her three sisters. In compiling multiple images into one, Khan creates a unique image, while also changing the way we approach the originals.

“A lot of people in the art world hate to use the word ‘Photoshop’, like it’s cheating or easy or something. I say bollocks to that—for me, it’s my tool, my paintbrush if you like, and lets me create my own visual language.”

- Idris Khan

A bit about Khan from San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery website:

"Idris Khan transforms the conceptual art of appropriation into an elegant and substantial meditation on the act of creativity. Appropriating icons of literature, music, and art, Khan methodically layers his material, whether it is Beethoven’s symphony, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s stylized sculpture of water towers. The process allows the artist to tease out certain areas adjusting the source material so that the soul of the piece is manifested in Khan’s accreted interpretation. For example, in Struggling to Hear… After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas, 2005, Beethoven’s entire series of sonatas becomes a dense wall of near blackness; a virtual illustration of the composer’s deafness.

Khan’s work tests our experience of these other art forms; words and music are experienced sequentially, however the artist compresses time visually. Photographic iconography such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water tower series—a body of work based on the inherent nature of recurring form—layer upon one another and ultimately create a ghostly animation describing the ‘essence’ of the form rather than each individual tower.

Born in Birmingham, England in 1978, Khan lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden (2011), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2009), and K20, Düsseldorf (2008). His work has been exhibited at Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg (2008), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2006), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006), and the Helsinki Kunsthalle (2005). His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, among others."

To see several of Nixon's "Brown Sisters" photographs, check out this previous post. Readers should know by this point that I have always loved this body of work!

twins revisited

In 2004 and 2005 I photographed identical twins for a series I called "The Space Between."

Aren't we all fascinated with the way people change over the years? "The Brown Sisters" by Nicholas Nixon has always been one of my favorite photographic series. Once a year, for more than twenty-five years now, he has photographed his wife and her three sisters grouped together in the same order, with a similar background; it gives the viewer the opportunity to marvel at how time has changed the women - and ultimately, of course, how time changes each one of us.

I've decided to revisit some of the twins I photographed eight years ago and make updated portraits. I hope to complete at least eight or ten diptychs for my show in May. I don't want to share all of them here (I'd like to have a few surprises at the exhibition!) but can't resist sharing the first two I've done.

Here are "Brian and Andrew" and "Martha and Mary." Incredibly, I was able to photograph them in the exact same locations as before.

the brown sisters

I've been thinking a lot about my sister, of course, since we are getting ready for our shared adventure to Uganda.

Which brings me to one of my favorite photographic projects of all time: the "Brown Sisters" by Nicholas Nixon.

In 1975, Nixon began taking an annual photograph of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters.  The tradition continued. The four women always pose in the same order: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie (youngest to oldest).

Here are some of my favorites from over the years.

1976

1980

1982

1987

1989

1991

1993

1995

1996

1999

2000

2003

2004

2009

2011