In the self-portraits of the series Self & City (2009), the gaze of Nicholas Nixon approaches abstraction. It is separated from his body and appears strange. Suddenly, the body is a silent mass; the living manifestation of its organic autonomy, of its animal nature. This becomes evident in the large format photographs where, for instance, the artist portrays the thickness of his beard, the unsteady lattice of his expectant iris, and the grooves inscribed onto his skin by time. It is precisely in the self-portraits where Nixon demonstrates how the closer the vantage point from which one observes the human body, the stranger it appears, the more foreign it becomes to what our eyes are accustomed to seeing. Nevertheless, within this sense of estrangement in the face of the body’s physicality and its vulnerability to time, a tender acceptance occurs.

Bebe and I, a photograph belonging to the homonymous series, seems to express the will to see, to bear witness to one’s own destiny, to recognize one’s self as changing over time. In it, Nixon continues to develop the portrayal of his own body found in Self & City incorporating Bebe Brown, his life companion and a fundamental part of his work, whose importance in the configuration of the photographer’s gaze becomes explicit in this image.