Which of the brown sisters passed away

NEW YORK — Prominent among the many masterpieces on view here in the Museum of Modern Art's monumental "People, Places, Things" millennium exhibition is a collection of family photos of four ordinary American sisters named Brown.

There are 25 of these now famous photographs, taken in succession every year from 1975 to the present by renowned documentary still photographer Nicholas Nixon.

At first glance, gathered together on a MOMA display wall in a single large frame, the "Brown Sisters" pictures seem almost snapshots.

But as MOMA and the art world discovered long ago, closer examination reveals something far more profound in them--a riveting visual expression of all that is true about sisters, about women, about life, about time.

On view last year at New York's Zabriskie Gallery, which displays all of Nixon's work, the series is now contained in a new book published by the Museum of Modern Art--"Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters."

In each image, the four sisters--from left, Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie--stand side by side, always in the same position relative to one another. In the early photos, they are in the flush of youth, 23, 15, 25 and 21, respectively. In the later pictures, they show the cares and wear of middle age, yet also its wisdom and contentments.

Their faces are open and guileless. They gaze at the camera with the patience, intensity, repose and apprehension to be expected of portrait subjects who must wait upon a painstaking photographer's click of the shutter.

The camera looks back at them, seeing deeply within.

As your eye moves from image to image in the series, you feel you are living their lives with these women. Their essential nature seems much the same. Yet, with the passing years, sadnesses and joys, hard times and good, seem to pass over their faces like cloud shadows and sunshine across a country landscape on a windy day. They age, their experiences accumulate, not only as measured by how they look compared with preceding pictures, but by how they look in relation to each other.

And even their sisterly relationships seem to vary, shift and change.

You come away with an impression of a whole that is indeed much greater than the sum of the parts.

Which is why the "Brown Sisters" is hanging in one of the most prestigious museums in the world. Nixon has long stood out as an artist who avoids the tricks and artifices of more glamorous photo portraitists like Philippe Halsman, Cindy Sherman, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead, he imbues his images with clear-eyed, simple and unabashed affection. This is true whether his subjects have been handicapped children, terminal AIDS patients, geriatric cases just a thread from death, smiling mothers and babies, or simply lovers in the park.

"He observes people and their environments without sentimentality but with genuine emotion," noted New York's Village Voice, in a review of the "Brown Sisters" exhibit, "a passion that's all the more eloquent for its restraint."

Nixon, who teaches photography at Boston's Massachusetts College of Art, has a particular reason for the affection evident in the "Sisters" series. Bebe, 50, the sister seen second from the right and a TV documentary producer, has been his wife since 1971.

If "Sisters" has proved to be Nixon's most lastingly famous work, it came about by accident. He took the first picture of the series simply as a memento of a 1975 family gathering.

"It was just kind of luck and whim and accident in the beginning," he said, in an interview. "I had the camera at a family weekend and I just made a picture one afternoon and liked it. It was just one summer day in New Canaan, Connecticut."

Nixon uses only 8-by-10-inch "view cameras," delicate instruments that provide an incredible depth of focus but require time, patience and the complete cooperation of his photographic subjects.

"The next year, on a similar weekend, when Laurie was graduating from college, I also had a camera and was also trying to find some way to make the weekend interesting aside from family. I had the idea to take another one because it was just about exactly a year later. It was only when I got that second picture that I said, `Oh, this is interesting.' "

It remained so, every year thereafter. Once, one of the sisters was in Japan and Nixon had to pay half her air fare to get her to make that year's picture, but the event has never been missed.

"It's pretty much the sense now that everybody accepts it as part of the rhythm," Nixon said. "So whenever there's a family gathering, they're pretty much happy to make an hour free to take the picture. They're a nice, close family. They like to get together once or twice a year anyway, especially in the summer."

Nixon is from Detroit and the Browns are from Providence, R.I. A graduate of the University of Michigan who made frequent visits to Chicago "for the art," he became a VISTA volunteer in St. Louis for a year, taught high school in Minneapolis, went to graduate school in New Mexico and then took a photography course in Colorado, where he met his wife.

Shortly after their marriage, they moved to Boston, where she became a producer for "Nova" at WGBH public television.

Sister Heather is now a lawyer, Mimi manages a health maintenance organization and Laurie is a volunteer with handicapped children.

One sister also lives in Massachusetts; another, in Texas; and another, in Vermont.

"I don't want to say which," Nixon said. "Two of them don't like this at all. They like the pictures but don't like their lives being in public."

Though he's honored to be part of MOMA's big millennium show, he's most pleased that the pictures have at last been gathered together in a book.

"It really means a lot to me," he said. "I was touched. The milestone of 25 years matters to me. I'd like to do another 25 years with them."

If his motivation is affection, he won't lack for that.

In his book's inscription, he wrote: "These pictures grew out of my curiosity about and admiration for this band of beautiful, strong women, who first let me into their lives, then allowed me to try making one picture, then joined me in a tradition, an annual rite of passage. I love my sisters-in-law Mimi, Laurie and Heather . . . Bebe, my true love, my best friend, is the center of my life. How lucky, how grateful I am."

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The exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art closes March 14.