Jackie Nickerson

This book presents previously unpublished work from Jackie Nickerson’s acclaimed Farm series. Farm was published by Random House in 2002 and features images made between 1997 and 2001 across Southern Africa. Unseen Farm is an exploration of the people working in agriculture in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa, and includes 6×7 medium-format photographs shot on film, Polaroids and contact sheets from the artist’s archive. Comparable to Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s influential account of US rural workers in the mid-1930s, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Nickerson’s vision is celebratory and non-judgmental while aware of photography’s limits in capturing the full depth of its subjects. In Edward K. Owusu-Ansah’s words: “Nickerson registers everything about her subjects in minute detail, sincerely and without commentary, allowing them to live through her lens. The result is a display of dignity amidst want, pride in labor and perseverance in spite of limited resources.”

From Chicago to Hawaii, from Utah to New York, Jackie Nickerson (born 1960) uses digital, film and smartphone cameras to capture repeated motifs—gas stations, chainlink fences, classrooms, basketball courts—that serve as markers of sameness amid this peculiar, precarious time.

Photographer Jackie Nickerson (born 1960) has worked for some of the world's leading luxury brands and magazines, including Louis Vuitton, Yeezy, Hermès, Dior, Vogue and Vanity Fair, and yet her fashion photography maintains an anti-commercial stance, the conviction that dressing and dressing up are less about clothes and more about the selves they help us to discover. "I think of clothing as a kind of architecture and part of my job is to find the right environment for it," she says. Often these environments are outside, shaped by changing rhythms of light and a sense of narrative, sometimes theatrical, nearly always open-ended. Clad is the first book wholly dedicated to Nickerson's fashion photography. In 400 pages and nearly as many images, it captures her fascination for clothing, both as object and act, as well as her interest in texture and costume.

Gathering Jackie Nickerson’s (born 1960) recent portraits of people caught in plastic and packaging materials, Field Test at once treats globalization, technology and medicine, commercialization, mass production, environmental degradation, migration, digitization, fake news and the COVID-19 pandemic.

American-born British artist Jackie Nickerson (born 1960) began photographing Zimbabwean farmworkers in 1996. Her first series of these portraits served to change the perception that those who work in African agriculture are disempowered, unmodern people by highlighting their individual personalities through their handmade clothing. Ever since, she has continued in the vein of portraiture as a tool for social awareness, with a particular emphasis on global labor practices and agriculture. Her recent series Salvage interrogates the homogeneity of the artistic conventions, such as balance, likeness, proportion and scale, that characterize the portrait genre. In contrast to these expectations, Nickerson’s photography engages both her subjects and her viewers with light, airy color palettes and nontraditional framing, sometimes obscuring her sitters’ faces to imply anonymity within a larger system or otherwise photographing them from a low angle to emphasize their authority within the image’s frame.