NANCY BURSON

COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPHY BY NANCY BURSON

Nancy Burson produced some of the earliest computer-generated portraits, and in collaboration with MIT engineers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, became a pioneer in the now familiar territory of computer-manipulated imagery. Burson continued to collaborate with Kramlich, together the two developed a significant computer program which gives the user the ability to age the human face and subsequently has assisted the FBI in locating missing persons. In Evolution II she combined the face of a man with that of a monkey to produce an imaginary portrait of a species (as well as a technology) in transition. This image was published in a series of manipulated portraits, reproduced in the book Composites (1986).

Evolution II, 1984.

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

Mankind (Oriental, Caucasian and Black, weighted according to current population statistics) 1983-85.

Warhead I (55% Reagan, 45% Brezhnev, less than 1% each of Thatcher, Mitterand and Deng) 1982

Whist looking to find more information on the works of Nancy Burson I came across some quota

tions (comments) she had made on her work and the purpose behind some of the ideas.

"My work from the last 25 years has been asking people to see differently"

" All of my early images were visual experiments to me. They were attempts to answer unasked questions like, what happens if you put images of six men and six women together, or if we combined a monkey's image with a human, would the result approximate an image of early man?"

" Don't we have to respond to people who don't seem "normal" to us?" Will my child grow up able to accept that not everyone looks the same?"

Burson's work is borderline between art and science, she creates imagery through digitally manipulated portraits which explore the human face. The work does not portray an actual, existing person but rather someone fictitious who is created in merging of several people's features. The Technique of superimposing portrait photographs was originally developed in the late 1870's by Francis Galton.

sources: //www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/burson_nancy.php

http://nancyburson.com/pages/fineart.html

http://www.photoquotations.com/a/119/Nancy+Burson

http://arken.wp.dk/content/us/arkens_collection/photography_and_graphics/nancy_burson