Nicholas Nixon
Commercial Wharf, Boston

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Images(3)

Artist Nicholas Nixon (American, born 1947)American, born 1947

CultureAmerican

Titles

Commercial Wharf, Boston

Date1975

Place depictedBoston, Massachusetts, United States

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 7 11/16 × 9 11/16 in. (19.5 × 24.6 cm)
Sheet: 8 × 9 15/16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm)

Credit LineBequest of Morgan Garwood

Object number2014.184

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionAfter moving to Boston in 1974, Nicholas Nixon took his camera to rooftops as a way to learn his new city, capturing views with great clarity using a large-format camera, an approach he soon expanded to include New York City and other sites. A year later, he began his best-known body of work, an ongoing series of annual portraits of his wife and her three sisters. While he is best known for portrait series of schoolchildren, the elderly and ailing, and his family, Nixon has continued to step back, both literally and metaphorically, to focus his lens on the changing urban landscape as a structural counterpoint to the personal scale of his portraits.
ProvenanceMorgan Garwood, New York; bequeathed to MFAH, 2014.
Exhibition History“A Critical Eye: Mid-Century American Photographs from the Morgan Garwood Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 23–November 2, 2014.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

verso bottom left in pencil "View of Boston from Commercial Wharf 1975"
upper left edge in ink reading vertically "8006"

verso bottom right in pencil "Nicholas Nixon:

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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