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. To produce this work, Burson combined images of Asian, Caucasian, and Black men,
weighting each race according to its size in the world population, thus creating a photograph of
everyone and no one. The artist has recently revisited racial issues in The Human Race
Machine—an interactive computer program that allows viewers to see themselves as members of
six different races—which is on view in the downstairs gallery. In this composite portrait of world
leaders, each subject is weighted according to the size of the nuclear arsenal of their country.
Following the exhibition of her "aged" images of Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and their young
son Prince William in 1984, Burson received an inquiry about using her aging software in the
search for missing children. After working with several families, she approached the parents of a
famous missing child—Etan Patz—who was six years old when he was last seen in Soho in
1979. In conjunction with the Patz family and the FBI agent assigned to the case, Burson
produced an aged portrait of Etan that was published on the front page of the New York Post and
has become one of her best-known works. Although this composite did not result in Etan's return,
Burson's aging software has helped the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children to locate numerous kidnap victims. Produced in collaboration with the staff at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, this work melds the images of a chimpanzee
and a human being. Conceived as an anthropological experiment, this work represents Burson's
attempt to approximate an image of early man.
Nancy Burson is sweet. We are learning the same thing that she did with pictures many, many
years ago. She helped finding missing people, by using her aging software. Also, she could
change the way people saw themselves, in like changing their racial identity.
cyndi period.4