Nancy Burson is an artist and photographer who was born in 1948. Her most influential work is mainly from digital technology, she is known for creating programs that allow the morphing of faces. outside of artistic endeavors she created the program that allows law enforcement to view what a missing child may look like later in life. This technology also help her to create her Human Race Machine. This program allows the user to take an image of themselves and apply physical characteristic changes that shows what the person would look like if they were another race.
In addition to making her own technology she also created work that uses an early version of layering images to composite images of people who were in the public eye and seen as beautiful in order to create an image of a fake person who would be a sort of baseline of someone who would be defined as attractive. In another composite she took a book of book of racial stereotypes and based on population statistics created an image of a person who's features represented the amalgamation of humankind.
What I find to be interesting about her work is that many artists attempt to create work that shows people what it is like from another perspective, or to show the world how certain constructs like beauty are just perspective, but with Burson's work for what i assume to be the first time was able to create work that was able to take those concepts or ideas and make them a physical reality. She was able to show people what it would be like if they came from another place or culture in the world, and break down what it was that we as a culture at the time considered beautiful or desirable in an attempt to understand why we found it to be.
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