Seeing and Believing
The art of Nancy Burson
Beginning in the early 1980s—when digital graphics were still in their infancy and long before software for morphing became easily obtainable—Burson produced a series of computer-generated composite portraits in collaboration with programmers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, who were then working at the Computer Corporation of America. The program created an average of several images by mapping facial coordinates and then finding their mean. Burson's attitude toward science is often steeped in irony, and her composites challenge earlier attempts to classify human physiognomies by such "scientists" as the eighteenth-century Swiss phrenologist Johann Kaspar Lavater and the Victorian anthropologist Sir Francis Galton—who was Darwin's cousin, the founder of eugenics, and the first to enlist composite photography in the now-discredited campaign to establish links between appearance, intelligence, and racial superiority
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As a visual experiment, Burson combined the faces of six men and six women, attempting to see which gender would dominate. She found that if you cover the mouth, the face appears more feminine. Like Mankind (1983–85), which is hanging nearby, this digital composite visualizes both popular fantasies and fears about what happens when genetic material mixes across race and gender.
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Burson's photographs of healers challenge the average skeptic. Surely the halo surrounding one healer must be a peculiar refraction of light coming in through the window? Not so, insists the artist. This is the real thing, and nothing will shake her certainty.
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In the mid-1990s, Burson refined her ideas about the relative nature of beauty in a series of large-scale Polaroids. Instead of conforming to standard cultural ideals of attractiveness, the individuals in these photographs have faces altered by cancer, reconstructive surgery, or prostheses. In a world saturated with mass-produced fantasies of flawless beauty, Burson's warm, intimate Polaroid portraits—which often include other family members—ask us to reconsider our dreams of perfection and to confront our own vulnerability and mortality
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Warhead