Nicholas Nixon Couples

From October 16 to November 24, 2001, Zabriskie Gallery presents Couples, new photographs by Nicholas Nixon. Over the last two years, Nixon produced this body of images centered on the topic of physical intimacy. Here, partners are captured at their most disarmed moments - kissing, embracing, teasing, and making love. Catching lovers in the act, these pictures acquire an endearing sensuality while retaining Nixon's fine eye for composition.

Utilizing an 8 x 10 view camera, Nixon makes contact prints directly from the negative. The spontaneity often achieved in his images belies the cumbersome equipment used to produce them. In this new body of work about the age-old subject of love, affection, and desire, Nixon, in his accomplished, alfresco style, reveals in detail - literally and figuratively - the nuances of relationships. Body to body, couples are recorded close-up, nestled, smiling at one another, cuddled or caressing, as well as in intercourse. These pictures risk saccharine sentimentality, and they retain sentiment no doubt. But the subject is absorbing no less for Nixon's virtuosic composition heightened with a documentary detachment that allows them this direct sweetness without seeming voyeuristic or sappy. As in previous work, Nicholas Nixon's photographs "depict their subjects without prejudice. They neither flatter them nor disdain them; they indulge in neither sentiment or irony" (Andy Grundberg). Over the last twenty-five years, Nixon has pursued series documenting cities, people on porches, old people, visiting nurses, people with AIDS, public schools, the Brown Sisters (one group portrait of his wife and her sisters every year), and his own immediate family. Most of these projects have documented change over time in the lives of their subjects, and together they have described people of all ages.

Nixon first gained national attention in the 1975 George Eastman House exhibition New Topographics, and has had solo exhibitions since then at major museums including the Art Institute of Chicago (1985), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1989), and the Museum of Modern Art (1976 and 1988), which organized his mid-career retrospective, Pictures of People. He has received three NEA Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Nixon's work has appeared in Zabriskie group shows since Ten Contemporary American Photographers at Galerie Zabriskie Paris in 1977. This is his ninth one-person show at Zabriskie.