Selected Group Exhibitions
1987 Realities Revisited: 15 British Photographers; Centre
Saidye Bronfman; Montreal, Quebec, Canada
1989 Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America; Interna-
tional Center of Photography, George Eastman House;
Rochester, New York, and traveling
2003 Oases: Group Exhibition; Laurence Miller Gallery,
New York, New York
Selected Works (Photo essays published in Life)
Marines Move into Lebanon, 1958
In Color: The Vicious Fighting in Vietnam, We Wade Deeper
into Jungle War, 1962–1963,Life
One Ride with Yankee Papa 13, 1965
Birds of Paradise, 1965
The Air War, 1966
Marines Blunt the Invasion from the North, 1966
Operation Prairie, 1966
Vietnam: A Degree of Disillusion, 1969Further Reading
Burrows, Larry.Larry Burrows, Compassionate Photogra-
pher. New York: Time Incorporated, 1972.
Burrows, Larry.Larry Burrows: Vietnam. Introduction by
David Halberstam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Page, Tim, and Horst Faas.Requiem: By the Photographers
Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1997.
Pyle, Richard, and Horst Faas.Lost Over Laos: A True
Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship. New York:
Da Capo Press, 2003.NANCY BURSON
American
The works of Nancy Burson have earned a place
within the history of postmodern photography
largely as images that challenge the viewer’s percep-
tion of visual reality, normality, beauty, and often,
abject ugliness. While Burson’s portraits share sur-
face similarities with the works of Diane Arbus and
Ralph Eugene Meatyard from the previous two dec-
ades, they are more directly related to conceptual
photography as well as being emblematic of con-
temporary experiments with digital photography,
exploring techniques of manipulation, simulation,
and reproduction. However, Burson has always
moved omnivorously among photographic media
and approaches, and her work is difficult to classify.
Burson’s oeuvre can be roughly organized into
three phases: her early work (1979 to 1991) dealt
with fantasy or surreal faces. These computer-gene-
rated works included composite imagery, aged por-
traits, and digitally manipulated faces that resulted
in bizarre and sometimes frightening anomalies.
Examples includeWarhead I, a computer-generat-
ed ‘‘portrait’’ composed of media images of world
leaders based on quantities of nuclear arsenals of
eachcountry.Thecompositeimageis55%ofRonald
Reagan, 45% of Leonid Brezhnev, and less than 1%
each of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
French President Franc ̧ois Mitterrand, and Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping. The work is presented as a
full frontal portrait in a format similar to a mug
shot, without background. The second phase of her
work—made between 1991 and 1995—includes
‘‘straight’’ photographic portraits of what Burson
calls ‘‘special faces,’’ namely persons whose features
have been deformed or marred by disease or other
natural abnormalities. The third phase (1996 to
the present) includes disparate images that com-
bine straight and manipulated technologies, among
these, color Polaroids of ‘‘faith healers’’ (theHealing
series), and collaborative projects that meld art
with science and technology, includingThe Human
Race Machine(2000), an interactive installation
that allows a viewer to picture himself or herself as
a different race or an amalgam of races.
In 1968, shortly after a move to New York City
from Denver (where Burson had studied painting at
Colorado Women’s College), she viewed an exhibi-
tion at the Museum of Modern Art that signaled a
turning point in her career.The Machine as Seen at
the End of the Mechanical Agetraversed six centuries
of historical intersections between art and technol-
ogy with a particular emphasis on technological art
of the 1960s. Bursonwas thus inspired to conceive an
interactive ageing machine, an installation that
would allow a viewer to age himself or herself withBURROWS, LARRY