RIFLE RANGE BOY

It was a cool German June morning. SS still had her bearings all wrong. She is still jet lagged. After all, she had just arrived at Leipzig University to present her paper. Today is a special day. It is the day she turns 50. Yes, the big scary Five-O! Wow, there used to be a time when she thought 50 was the age where people plan for retirement to play stupid little games with their spoilt brat grandchildren. But, hell no! She has so much to achieve. The last things she feels now is old. Sure, a little aches here and there, breathlessness, extra pounds around the mid-riff but old, no way. Not bad, she told herself. Coming from humble beginnings in a household where melancholy was the tone everyday, she has come far. Her childhood was plagued with chronic asthma which she kept cursing her paternal side of her family as they were the carriers of that gene. Every member of his family had one thing to boast about - asthma. It was like a family heritage. She spent many days crouched bre...

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/magazine/01-brown-sisters-forty-years.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=1 Photographs by NICHOLAS NIXON The Brown sisters have been photographed every year since 1975. The latest image in the series is published here for the first time. . 1975, New Canaan, Conn. Text by SUSAN MINOT OCTOBER 3, 2014 Nicholas Nixon was visiting his wife’s family when, “on a whim,” he said, he asked her and her three sisters if he could take their picture. It was summer 1975, and a black-and-white photograph of four young women — elbows casually attenuated, in summer shirts and pants, standing pale and luminous against a velvety background of trees and lawn — was the result. A year later, at the graduation of one of the sisters, while readying a shot of them, he suggested they line up in the same order. After he saw the image, he asked them if the...