Nancy Burson

NANCY BURSON

ALARMING VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

Nancy Burson works in the borderland between art and science. In her digitally manipulated portrait photographs she explores the human face, its morphology and genetic codes. The result is a both terrifying and visually arresting commentary to the current developments in information technology. 


Warhead, 1982

Description
Warhead portrays a middle-aged man shown frontally on a black background. His face has pronounced features. He has black hair, heavy, bushy eyebrows and thin, slightly pursed lips. He looks straight at the viewer with a concentrated and serious demeanour.

About the work
Warhead is a portrait photograph done on a computer. The work does not portray an actual, existing person but rather someone fictitious who is created in the merging of several people’s features in the computer’s digitally manipulable image world.
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About Burson’s art in general
Nancy Burson’s composite portraits take the form of an exploration of the human face. The technique of superimposing portrait photographs on each other was originally developed in the late 1870s by the British scientist Francis Galton, the father of genetics as a scientific discipline.
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Literature
”Ansigtets geometri”, The National Museum of Photography, 2003.
”Mennesket – et halvt århundrede set gennem kroppen”, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, 2000.
“Rien que la chose exorbitée..: Nancy Burson (et al.)“, (Regis Durand), 1990.
“Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age”, (Geoffrey Batchen), Aperture Foundation, 1994.
“The Age Machine and Composite Portraits”, (Nancy Burson), MIT List Visual Arts Center, May 12-July 1, 1990. Cambridge, Mass.: The Center, 1990.
“Focus: How your Energy Can Change the World”, (Nancy Burson), New York, N.Y.: New York: ibooks; Distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2004.
“Composites: Computer-Generated Portraits”, (Nancy Burson, Richard Carling, and David Kramlich). New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986.
“Faces” (Nancy Burson and Jeanne McDermott), Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 1993.