Androgyny (6 Women + 6 Men)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Nancy Burson

1982

Photograph

11"x14"
Gelatin-Silver Press
12/15

Highlights

Description

Years before photo manipulation tools such as Photoshop were common, Nancy Burson, in conjunction with MIT programmers Richard Carling and David Kramlich, used computers to create Androgeny, a picture of a morphed human face that combined twelve photographs—six male and six female. The code blended the features of the photographs at a pixel level, resulting in a final image that is neither male nor female.

Like much of her work of the time, the image asks questions around stereotypes, gender, and what “average” means. The work is also a technical achievement. Androgeny is one of the earliest known artistic uses of digital morphing—years before it entered pop culture with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video and Hollywood CGI. Burson also used the program to create a portfolio of well-known works that combined world leaders, people of different races, and portraits of businessmen.

The same computer program used for Androgeny was later used by the FBI to age human faces and solve missing persons cases.