Nicholas Nixon at Zabriskie - New York - Brief Article

Among the "New Topographics" photographers of the 1970s who reintroduced the somewhat cumbersome large-format view camera in pursuit of the dispassionate and descriptive image, Nicholas Nixon is known for the apparent spontaneity of a documentary portraiture more usually associated with a 35mm camera. Today his full-frame, black-and-white, 8-by-10-inch contact prints still aspire to the overall clarity consistent with the view-camera genre. For "Couples," a new body of work concerning physical intimacy, Nixon solicited the involvement of potential subjects by placing ads in Boston/Cambridge-area newspapers near his home.

In some 60 images, Nixon portrays couples in companionable, occasionally erotic embrace. Sexual identity seems almost irrelevant to his purpose and sometimes impossible to discern; in many of the more abstracted images of the series, limbs interlace like the hitches of a boater's knots, and arms and legs mass within or crisply bisect the image frame. Arms trace strong diagonals through C.K., R.L. Dorchester (2001), while in A.M., M.E. Roxbury (2000) a cluttered frame spills over with hands, arms, a breast. The intertwined figures of L.B., L.B. Boston (2001) incidentally reveal glimpses of dark satin and striped shorts within sensual patterns of toned flesh, here adding sexuality and the attributes of gender to an essentially formal image. What might well be a flash of scrotum appears like a lady's slipper among the tangled thighs, grassy field and little meadow flowers of Y.A., J.S. Vevey, Switzerland (2000), perhaps as a sign of the tender regard with which the photographer approaches his trusting subjects. Such images recall Jack Smith's innovative cropping and framing of the early 1960s, subjects filling the frame and expanding beyond it to enliven and confuse what lies within.

Other images appear to be more conventionally spontaneous. The couples are younger or older, the former more involved in their youth, the latter more involved with each other. As though to make his production relevant to contemporary market discourse and prevailing display methods, Nixon mounted three mural-sized images from the series on aluminum and installed them in a separate viewing room. Their heightened contrast, adjusted for the loss of the nuance that is available in contact prints, substantially altered without compromising Nixon's allegiance to the well-framed image.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group