Karen Wallace's Photography for Social Change

American artist/photographer Nancy Burson (born 1948) has made her mark in digital photography by using compositing and morphing technologies to critique Western stereotypes of race, gender, and beauty; promote diversity; and underscore the commonality of all humanity.  She is best known for her early work in computer-generated portraits, and did pioneering work in the early Eighties with MIT engineers Richard Carling and David Kramlich (whom she later married) to develop a program which ages the human face, and which is still used by the FBI to find missing children (“Nancy Burson,” Museum of Contemporary Photography).   She went on to create provocative composite portraits of races, genders, world leaders, and celebrities, which gained her attention in the later Eighties, and in the Nineties incorporated more primitive media like daguerreotypes and images made with toy cameras.  These were lower-tech but compelling in a more personal and difficult way, focusing on birth defects and disease (“Nancy Burson,” Smithsonian American Art Museum). More recently, Burson has been publishing composites of her own paintings and photographs (“Nancy Burson,” nancyburson.com).

She has collaborated on many projects, the best-known being “There’s No Gene for Race” at the London Millennium Dome in 2000 (“Nancy Burson,” Wikipedia), which showed what a person might look like if s/he were a member of another race and later developed into her Human Race Machine, which was later used to illustrate and support a 2003 Scientific American article’s argument that there was not (“Is There a Gene for Race?” 84).   In addition to her exhibitions and collaborations, she has also taught photography at Harvard and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and her work has been featured on Oprah and NPR.  She lives in New York  (“Nancy Burson,” Wikipedia).  However, there are no photographs of her face to be found anywhere.  Nancy Burson appears to be keeping her own face out of her critique of Western facial stereotypes of race, gender, and beauty.

On her website, “Nancy Burson” <nancy burson.com>, there is a fascinating sampling of her work, including photos from The Human Race Machine and a new app of it for your iphone, which was issued in 2011.  In a series named “One/Goddess,” which includes several series of composites of world divinities’ faces, there is one series called “Guy Who Looks Like Jesus/Woman Who Looks Like Mary,” which interrogates the two centuries of Eurocentric representations of the faces of the Christian icons of Jesus and his mother Mary.  Nowhere on the website is there a date for these two compositings, but they are clearly an outgrowth of the technology of The Human Race Machine, which would place them in the early 2000’s.  Starting with portraits of eight bearded young men who might look like Jesus from each of the major ethnicities of the world and compositing them all into one final Jesus, Burson challenges Eurocentric assumptions of skin tone, facial features, and hair that have been built up around the face of masculine divinity. What the composite offers is a man who looks a little bit like everyone who might be looking at it, perhaps desiring a Christ whom they can identify with, and certainly looking a lot more like a real Jesus might have.  Burson does the same with the face of Mary to challenge the same assumptions about the female divine.  In this case her eight ethnic models have in common a veil to replace the meta-symbol of the beard in the Jesus series.  And again, the composite Mary looks a little like every woman looking at her face, someone approachable and human.

Interestingly, Burson’s composite Mary looks a lot like paintings of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, the indigenous representation of Mary, the mother of Jesus, worshipped by millions of Latina Catholics.  Feminist theology asserts that there was a need for a divine feminine in Christianity who “looks like me” which was filled by this image, and even that image started out quite European-looking in the 18^th century and has gradually become browner and more india.  Says leading feminist and liberation theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether in Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, “The figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe can be adapted to a Creole, mestizo, or Indian celebration of identity as well as the merger of these identities in ‘la Raza’” (219).   Black theology has not only claimed a Black Christ, but womanist (or Black feminist) theology has represented Him androgynously, claiming the strength of the black woman for Him.  Says womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas in The Black Christ,  “In addition to highlighting the presence of Christ in those who work toward Black wholeness, a womanist Black Christ will consistently lift up the presence of Christ in the faces of the poorest Black women” (108).   A painting of Christ titled “Jesus of the People” by Janet McKenzie using a Black woman as a model became quite popular in liberal seminary bookshops in 2005.

So perhaps Burson had been reading some liberation theology when she made the composite photograph series “Jesus/Mary,” but she didn’t go as far as she might have if she had interrogated assumptions of gender as well as ethnicity.  In another of her composites in her 2003 “One/Goddess” series (this one her website dates), she morphs the faces of Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha into an image she names “One,” and the faces of Mary, Quan Yin, and Isis into an image she names “Goddess.”  Then she morphs them all into an image called “God/Goddess” (“Nancy Burson,” nancyburson.com).  Granted, these are simpler drawings with no beards or veils to complicate compilation.  And, importantly, clearly she got to her gender critique in with “One/Godess”:  The divine is not raced or gendered, she is saying; it is enough that we give God/dess a face.  Amen, Nancy!

Works Cited

Burson, Nancy.  “One/Goddess.”  <nancyburson.com/pages/fineart_pages/jesusmary.html>.

Douglas, Kelly Brown.  The Black Christ.  Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 2001.

“Is There a Gene for Race?”  Scientific American.  December 2003. <www.brandeis.edu/provost/diversitypdfs/Does_Race_Exist>.

McKenzie, Janet.  “Jesus of the People.”  Lasting Visions, LLC.

“Nancy Burson.”  Museum of Contemporary Photography.  <www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/burson_nancy.php>.

“Nancy Burson,” Smithsonian American Art Museum.  <americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.efm?ID=679>.

“Nancy Burson.” Wikipedia.  <nancyburson.com/page/fineart.html>.

“Nancy Burson Faces.”  <http://www.google.com/search?q=nancy+burson+faces&gt;.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford.  Goddesses and the Divine Feminine.  Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005.