DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Nicholas Nixon
Nicholas Nixon has never taken a journalistic approach to his past themes, such as aging or AIDS. He treats them not as powerful metaphors or social problems but simply as a part of life, with a tenderness, lyricism, and honesty that lacks sentimentality. The Perkins School for the Blind Series is no exception. Nixon spent a two year period with 240 students of varying degrees of blindness, many of whom are also severely impaired due to illness, accidents, and birth defects. "The students of Perkins have moved me wonderfully, deeply," says Nixon, "I hope their kindness towards me shows, and that their faces show some of the light I see in them: steady, expanding, large, a gift." Nixon pushes the photographic process to yield as much information as possible—maximum detail and the widest tonal range result from use of a 14” x 17" camera made specifically for him. His subjects cannot react directly with the camera, and their lack of gaze and quiet movement create a gentle, poetic quality of humility and conviction, of patience, hope, and perseverance, of mutual support, of poignancy. The subjects, untempered by self-consciousness, dominate the composition with their pure emotions. By portraying human needs and concerns, Nixon forces the audience to become involved in a world to which they have been blind.
