The Brown Sisters, Brookline, Massachusetts 2020

This is Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters, Brookline, Massachusetts”, and it’s a photograph. I love the quietness, the intimacy of the black and white, how it strips everything back to the basics. Each face is like a landscape, etched with time. Look at the way the light catches the lines around their eyes, the subtle shadows under their cheekbones. Nixon isn't trying to hide anything; he’s interested in the process of aging. It’s all about the surface, the texture of skin, the way hair falls. The details are there, but it's how they come together that creates the emotional impact. The grid format is key; it’s like seeing different versions of the same story, or different angles on a single face. I think of other artists who explored the passage of time and the human condition, like the later portraits of Alice Neel, who also had a way of capturing something essential about her subjects with brutal honesty. Art is a conversation and Nixon has given us something profound to think about.