Adams, Nixon... and a new Eastman House project

In 2006 I wrote a post detailing some acquisitions at SFMOMA. Among the SFMOMA curators with whom I spoke was Sandra Phillips, who heads up the museum's photography department. She told me this story. I've tried to interest magazines in it for years (maybe it would be a better book?), but because it's a season of New Topographics at LACMA and because of the recent launch of a George Eastman House project, I thought now would be a good time to share it.

Robert Adams and Nick Nixon are two of the grand men of recent American photography. Nixon has been recently celebrated in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and at the Museum of Modern Art, and in the last few years Adams has been the subject of solo shows at SFMOMA and at the Getty Museum. Their work is in the permanent collection of just about every major American museum.

The two men have been friends since they were included in a 1975 exhibit at the George Eastman House. Titled "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," the exhibition is arguably the most important photography group show of the last 35 years. This season it is being celebrated at LACMA via a reprise of sorts.

In 2004, Adams and his wife Kerstin celebrated their friendship with Nixon by giving SFMOMA a gift of 51 Nixon photographs. [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, View of the River Street Bridge, Storrow Drive, and the Charles River, Boston, 1975; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.] All are gelatin silver prints. Some are four-by-six inch baby photos, some are classics of Nixon's oeuvre. What distinguishes them is what's on the back of the prints.

"Bob has had this very long relations with Nick Nixon," Phillips told me. "The relationship exists not only in person, but in letters and through photographs. The wonderful thing about this gift is that on back of the photographs are letters to Bob from Nick."

Phillips explained that for the last three decades the two men have exchanged old-fashioned, hand-written notes directly on the backs of their photographs. The notes are not written on paper taped to the back of the photos, but are on the photographic paper itself. The letters are about their families, their lives, and about their shared love of photography.

"Bob is a very important guy and he's a very approachable guy among his peers," Phillips said. "This relationship started many, many years ago and I think there's a mutual admiration between Nick and Bob Adams. When you see Bob you know that when you talk to him that you know about his friendships. He very much values his relationship with Nick." [Image above: Nicholas Nixon, Nina and John SZ, 1979; gelatin silver print, 8 in. x 10 in. SFMOMA. Gift of Kerstin and Robert Adams.]

I have not seen the correspondence, but I wonder if it's a dialogue between two different Americas. Adams, who has lived in California, Colorado and now in rural Oregon, is arguably the most-admired photographer of the evolving, increasingly developed American West. There are not a lot of humans in Adams' landscapes. Nixon has been an Easterner his entire life. Boston is his base. He has long made portraits and communities the focus of his work.

It may be that no one aside from Adams, Nixon and a couple SFMOMA curators has seen the correspondence. Maybe that can change: Earlier this year the George Eastman House, with the help of a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, launched a new photo wiki called Notes on Photographs. (A detailed description of the project/wiki is here.) Among the features of the wiki is a section that will chronicle the marks on the backs of photographs: signatures, labels and so on. Digital images of such are and will be available on the Notes on Photographs website: Here's a Margaret Bourke-White, a Weegee, and a lot of Hines. It seems like a good place for SFMOMA to begin to share with us the Nixon-Adams relationship in its collection...

Related: I reviewed the NGA's 2005 'Brown Sisters' Nicholas Nixon exhibition for the Boston Globe. Me on Robert Adams at the Getty in 2006. Thanks to Luke Strosnider's Touching Harms the Art for the Eastman House project tip.