Nicholas Nixon @ Cleveland Museum of Art
by NY Arts
Free Clinic: I’m not very good at working for other people. I mostly make pictures because of some whim. With luck, I get a glimpse of something, and then it turns into an adventure, and then into a project. But the original idea is usually mine. The pictures at the Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland were different.
The politics and history of the place were promising, a good omen. But seeing the patients convinced me. Despite their pain, their fatigue and resignation, they seemed willing to be themselves in front of a reasonably polite stranger. The clinic staff’s core of kindness, their devotion and basic humanness, filled the plain rooms. I could see that so much that is good, so often unavailable elsewhere, flows freely in this one place, because of one foundation, which has supported it, year after year, under siege from the rest of the world. The clear and visible evidence of their effort made it easy for me to try to honor their work with mine.
I probably wouldn’t have even gotten to see the patients at all if Mark Schwartz had not been so persistent at first, and so wonderful afterwards. He was persuasive, compelling, the best sort of collaborator and advocate. This whole project is like his work of art. Maybe "work of life" is better.
About Nicholas Nixon
Born 1947, Detroit, Michigan
Lives in Brookline, Massachusetts
Nicholas Nixon rose to prominence as a chronicler of large cityscapes. Since the mid-1970s, however, he has produced distinctive, unflinchingly powerful portraits of an extraordinary range of subjects, from his wife and family to the elderly and the terminally ill. Nixon uses an 8×10-inch view camera, black-and-white film, and contact prints to capture a visually complex, emotionally rich view of what it means to be human.
