NEW YORK, NY.- In August 1974, the photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) made a group portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie. He did not keep the image, but in 1975 he made another portrait of the four—who then ranged in age from fifteen to twenty five—with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, whose large negatives capture a wealth of detail and a luscious continuity of tone. Nixon and the sisters have gathered for an annual portrait ever since.

This book celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the project with luminous tritone reproductions of all forty portraits and a new afterword by Sarah Hermanson Meister, examining the series’ public exhibitions and its cult following. Like the previous collections published in 1999 and 2008 for its twenty-fifth and thirty-third anniversaries (both out of print), The Brown Sisters: Forty Years is a milestone in a project that we hope will continue for many years to come.

The Brown Sisters: Forty Years is available at MoMA Stores and online at www.MoMAStore.org. It is distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson outside the United States and Canada.

Nicholas Nixon was born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan. He has worked as an independent photographer since 1974. He is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer's Fellowships, and a Massachusetts Council for the Arts "New Works" Grant. He is currently a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Nixon has had numerous one-person exhibitions, showing in particular his ongoing portrait of the Brown sisters at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the author of Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (MoMA, 2013) and Picturing New York: Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2009), as well as publications featuring the work of Rudy Burckhardt and Walker Evans, among others.

Nicholas Nixon: Forty Years of The Brown Sisters is on view at The Museum of Modern Art from November 22, 2014 through January 4, 2015.