Nancy Burson works within photography, drawing and computer imaging. Burson has used a wide variety of mediums to get exactly what she wants from her work. Some of those include billboards, photolithographs on silk, daguerreotypes, large format Polaroids, computer generated work, as well as interactive works and other more “classic” types of mediums, such as charcoal and oil paints. She finds all of these mediums necessary so that she can portray her work in the best way possible. Her earlier work on the computer came before her work with “straight” photography.
During the years of 1979 and 1991 Burson worked on creating computer generated images as what she called “fantastical faces”. She made a mix of aged portraits and digitally manipulated facial features. She was part of a team that created the software to help find missing children by aging their photographs. She then went on, during 1991 – 1995, to create photographic portraits of “special faces”. She deemed them special because they were photographs of children and adults that have altered facial structures, some of them were natural and some of them were due to circumstances. During 1996 up to the present day Burson has been working on projects that connect her fascination of the fantastical to her seemingly contradictory relationship she had with science. Burson also has an awareness of the spiritual connections that all living things seem to have with each other.
Burson’s work shows us the ugly, the beautiful, the sick, and the diseased and challenges our traditional views of what all of those things might look like. She wants the viewer to become part of that experience that she captured and to become aware of how we judge each other based on purely appearances. Her work can be hard to look at and even haunting. The first images I saw were the facial composites which I thought were really cool and the more you look at them the more they change and can become ugly or beautiful depending on what features start to stand out. The work that had to deal with the facial disfiguration was really hard for me to look at and I think it may have been because of my own perception of what beautiful and sickness and all those other categories should look like and it definitely challenges my views on those things. So I completely believe that her work is successful not only is her work conveying exactly what she wants to convey, there is also balance and contrast and all these other formal elements that make the pictures so successful.
