The Work of Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson is an American artist and photographer who lives and works in New York.  She is accredited as being one of the first artists to combine digital media technology with photographic portraiture.  Burson’s career soared in the late 1960’s after her collaboration project with MIT engineers to develop an aging machine.  This technology, later used by the F.B.I. to search for missing children and adults years after their disappearance, allows one to age enhance and alter the human appearance by warping and stretching digital portraits.  Burson applied this technology to the development of composite photographs that are showcased in her book, Composites: Computer-Generated Portraits, published in 1982, that includes her famous work First Beauty Composite (1982).  Burson expanded her work in 2000 with the creation of The Human Race Machine, a computerized console that allows participants to resemble other races.  Nancy Burson’s work combines “art and innovation in a way that [challenges] photographic truth at the birth of digital manipulation”. 

Both The Human Race Machine (2000) and First Beauty Composite (1982) aim to challenge photographic truths and act as globally uniting works to rid gender and racial stereotypes.  Burson’s work takes unusual and varying forms that draw the viewer in with their ‘perfection’ or ‘stereotypes’ and invites the viewer to confront these social stigmas and breakdown how we perceive ourselves and others in society.  The far-reaching implications of Burson’s work make her not only a powerful artist but also an important activist for social change and individual and communal acceptance.

First and Second Beauty Composites (Left: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe. Right: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, Meryl Streep), 1982

 The Human Race Machine, 2000