Nixon is best known for The Brown Sisters, the annual portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, and much less for everything else, which this book documents for the first time across more than forty years of work. In a statement on photography published in 1975 he wrote that the world is infinitely more interesting than any of his opinions about it; to show the world as he sees it he has always used unwieldy large-format cameras, with 8 x 10 or 11 x 14 inch negatives, so that life is described in precise and often startling detail.