Warhead I

1982

Not on view

Burson was among the first artists to apply digital technology to the genre of photographic portraiture. In the late 1970s she began working with computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop software that could be used to “age” a human face. By the early 1980s she was digitally blending the faces of groups of individuals to produce composite portraits of stock types such as businessmen, movie stars, and assassins. This composite was created using images of five world leaders, each represented proportionally by the number of nuclear warheads deployable by the nation they led: Ronald Reagan (55%), Leonid Brezhnev (45%), Margaret Thatcher (less than 1%), François Mitterand (less than 1%), and Deng Xiaoping (less than 1%).

Artwork Details

Title: Warhead I
Artist: Nancy Burson (American, born 1948)
Date: 1982
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 19.3 × 19.2 cm (7 5/8 × 7 9/16 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1993
Object Number: 1993.459
Rights and Reproduction: © Nancy Burson
Curatorial Department: Photographs

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