Photographer Clyde Nichols' Community Yearbook

Photographer Clyde Nichols' Community Yearbook

Jan 31, 2025

When California native Clyde Nichols moved to NYC for college in 2020, the young photographer was greeted with unexpected shut downs and isolation. “My relationship to the city and the creative world of New York began in the strange aftermath of the pandemic,” he says, which sparked the desire to “cultivate a community of artists” for himself.

The following year, Nichols began what has evolved into an annual project, inviting his social circle to an at-home photoshoot as a way to chronicle his surrounding world. In December of 2024, Nichols’ fourth installment of the photo series, he opened his doors for what he describes as an “extravaganza,” with attendees like artist Tasneem Sarkez, actor Renée Nicole Powell and fashion creator Lexi Brown. Even the esteemed Coco Fusco stopped by.

Below, PAPER learns more about Clyde Nichols’ yearbook, featuring behind-the-scenes shots of the day from his assistant Jack Ramsdell. As Nichols tells us, “There was no choice but to lean into the chaos” of it all.

Photography: Clyde Nichols

There was no choice but to lean into the chaos.

What initially sparked the idea for this project when you began in 2021?

I had just moved into my studio apartment on the Lower East Side and was really enjoying being able to host little dinner parties. Quickly, I began to discover that what I cared most about when I gathered a group of people was the building the environment: perfecting the lighting, arranging flowers and laying out the table. Looking back, I was obsessively engaged in this ritual of building a set and filling it with the characters of my life.

At the same time, I was spending a lot of time looking at the work of photographers who dealt with the staged image and the portrait. Beyond obvious attractions to artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Paul Sepuya, I was thinking a lot about the fabrication of Buck Ellison’s images, Alex Prager’s elaborate tableaux, Duane Michal’s photo poems, Herb Ritts’ studies of the body and Leslie Hewitt’s still lifes.

One night I was sitting at my dining table with my best friend Bianca, watching her tie back her hair. It hit me that I had to create an image. The photos I took of her that night were minimal and raw, but struck a chord with the both of us. From those initial images the idea of dedicating a day for each of my friends to come and sit at the table arose. When that first photo series was selected as a finalist for Aperture Magazine’s annual portfolio prize, I was shocked and daunted at the same time. Something special happened in that first year — it was earnest and unassuming. I knew I had arrived at the start of a lifelong commitment, and that this was a project I needed to carry out annually.

How has the project developed over four years since the first iteration?

I now realize that despite my intense focus on my friends and their figures, each iteration represents my own psychic state and my relationship to image making just as much as the people that populate the photographs.

The years of shooting in my tiny studio apartment were cramped, chaotic and hot. I would tape trash bags over the windows to block the light from shining through the back of the seamless backdrop paper. Rearranging the space to accommodate the shoot was like playing a life-sized game of Tetris. Half of my apartment would end up stacked precariously in the shower, and my mattress would be flipped on its side in the kitchen. I’d disassemble my bed frame and the night before the shoot each year I’d sleep on the floor of my entryway. There was no choice but to lean into the chaos. I’d let people smoke cigarettes inside, blast music and keep their shoes on, and the stairway became my second living room with larger crowds of people outside the apartment than inside it.

The second year I remember feeling limited by the 10 ft by 10 ft room and wanting the space to feel more expansive. I meticulously cut and taped curved pieces of backing paper to eliminate every corner and hard edge of the room. It was like entering a void. The following year, in a rejection of that sterility, I did away with the backdrop entirely and shot people on the bare wood floors. Each year is a reaction to the last, like a pendulum swinging in a year-long arc.

Photography: Clyde Nichols

I’ve invited exes, enemies, acquaintances and coworkers.

How do you approach casting for each round? Is this your close network or do you open it up to the wider community?

From the start, I haven’t been interested in only inviting the people around me that I feel most comfortable and closest with (although I always insist those people come). The reality of my life is far messier and it would feel disingenuous to smooth over that. My process for who I invite is about being honest with myself about who has played a role in my life that year — positive or negative. I’ve invited exes, enemies, acquaintances and coworkers. I try not to hold back. Unsurprisingly, this free-for-all selection can cause some drama.

In the earlier years, I tried to schedule the 20-40 people that would come in precise 30 minute intervals to avoid any tense confrontations. I’ve since given up. If people want to bring conflict to the shoot, that's their prerogative. Most of the time people leave with a smile on their face, nice images of themselves, a new friend or even a date.

When you look at the casting across four years, what do you see? Any gradual changes or developments?

This is the fourth year, so some of the macro changes I am super excited to see have only just started to become noticeable. Like how people’s faces age, posture strengthens or expressions harden. When I started most of us were 18 and 19 years old, so over the course of the project at the major milestones of 10, 25, and 50 years, those changes will be stark.

But at this age, life moves fast and many of the changes aren’t gradual at all. There’s never been a single couple to appear together two years in a row. Friend groups will pose and then collapse two months later. Two strangers will come six hours apart one year and then be smiling cheek to cheek the next.

Photography: Jack Ramsdell

I’m young, busy, scattered and hopeful, and the people around me reflect those things.

You describe this project as an "indirect self-portrait." I think that's interesting — how do you maintain the individual throughout the larger process?

It’s easy to inadvertently make the images about myself — how I see or feel about a person, what I think is the most flattering version of someone, the way I want to remember this person’s face lit, the people I want to pose together. It can quickly become egocentric. I think it’s impossible to ignore both realities — that no matter how hard I try, the images are images of me, and that it's also my responsibility to ignore myself as I look at my subjects through the lens.

I think what grounds me across the years is the trust that my friends place in me to represent them. As a generation, we are hyper-proficient in creating auto-fiction. Since we became sentient, it has been within our own power to photograph, describe and curate the collection of self portraits that define our online appearances. I’ve noticed this proclivity for complete control over self-portraiture to be a significant challenge when photographing my peers. Instead of creating an image of the figure they project, I often have to allow my subjects to surpass a point of boredom and fatigue behind the camera — to give up or lapse in their performance of how they want to be seen. That’s when I make the most compelling photographs.

What prompts, if any, are given to the subjects? How do you build out your apartment so that it can become this photo set?

In the first years of the shoot I would ask people to bring a prop that represented themselves and come wearing an outfit that was the most them at that moment. We had a lot of fun staging exaggerated tablescapes and still-lifes with these objects, but I think that they were ultimately a distraction from the kinds of intimate images I want. Now, I let people tell me how they’d like to be posed and would say my role is in helping realize my subject’s vision.

This year I’ve moved into a new lofted apartment with two lovely roommates, massive ceilings and huge windows. It’s really the ideal space for this kind of occasion. We did a bit of rearranging, but mostly just threw up some seamless and got to work. One notable first for the year was the addition of a popup kitchen by my dear friend and head baker of Sparrowbush Bakery, Eero Fleming, who created a menu for the day and served some amazing dishes.

Photography: Jack Ramsdell

There were musicians, painters, writers, actors, models, students, designers and plenty of people who don’t really know what they’re doing yet.

This year, what do you remember most from the day?

Parsing clear memories from the adrenaline-filled blur isn’t easy. When we start at 10 AM, I feel like I'm diving into a dark tunnel system, or taking one last breath before swimming deep underwater. I enter a kind of flow and I am only fully aware of what happened after the next morning.

That being said, I remember two moments from this year pretty clearly. The first was picking up my vibrating phone to see two missed calls and throwing open the door to find Coco Fusco standing there, in an all leather outfit. The other was the first time I can remember in all four years that I was able to sit on the couch and observe the room from afar while my extraordinary assistant and collaborator Jack Ramsdell set the next scene. For that moment I was able to stop and look around the room at the spectacle of the event, and appreciate all the beautiful faces and people I love in one room together.

Tell me about some of the faces featured in this year's iteration. How are they a reflection of where you're at, right now, as the nucleus of this whole project?

I’m young, busy, scattered and hopeful, and the people around me reflect those things. The group this year was about half former Cooper Union class mates, and half friends from around the city. There were musicians, painters, writers, actors, models, students, designers and plenty of people who don’t really know what they’re doing yet.

Sometimes the nebulous chaotic mess of the day makes it feel impossible to create meaningful and cohesive imagery. But recently I have realized that it’s a great sign that I’m not fully aware of what I’m doing in the moment. I think I'm making the photos with the trust that they will mean more and more with time, and that this meaning will reveal itself.

I’m motivated by a belief in the power of scarce, deliberate imagery. I believe we need to make more images of one another that will represent us to future generations, beyond our own inherently limited and contrived self-portraits. I don’t mind making people wait to figure out exactly what it is that’s happening here. Maybe in 10 years someone else will be able to turn to me and say, “Ah! This is what it was about all along,” but for now I’m happy to let the images speak for themselves.

Photos courtesy of Clyde Nichols