A self-taught artist, he brought narrative to modern photography with sequences of staged black-and-white images, often accompanied by wry or lyrical captions.
His camera captured subjects as diverse as New York City during the Summer of Love in 1967, Siberia under Soviet rule and the Adirondacks in upstate New York.
A court banned the city three years ago from "either compelling or suppressing Nelson’s photography and writing" under its public accommodations law, which is superseded by the First Amendment.