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ANDROGYNY (6 MEN + 6 WOMEN) by Nancy Burson
Photography is a perfect medium for recording the past.
But until Nancy Burson’s Androg yny, it was useless for pre-
dicting the future. Two decades before the shape-shifting
enabled by digital photography became ubiquitous, Bur-
son worked with MIT scientists to develop technology that
let her craft this composite image of the faces of six men
and six women. The effect was revolutionary. Photographs
could suddenly be used to project how someone would
look, not just how they once did. Burson’s composite work
led her to develop pioneering software that could digitally
age faces—the first time these images could be based on
more than guesses. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
acquired Burson’s software to create present-day images of
people who had gone missing years earlier, and it has been
used to locate numerous missing persons.