Nancy Burson

Still images from “Beauty Composites” 1982

(1) First Beauty Composite : Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren & Marilyn Monroe.

(2) Second Beauty Composite: Jane Fonda, Jaqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields & Meryl Streep.

Nancy (Born 1948) challenged the notion of beauty by calculating the “averages” of starlets at the time and rendering the “perfect beauty” that is devoid of individuality. She is best known for this pioneering work in morphing technology.

Nancy’s writing on the topic of a Chimera

Chimera is an ancient word meaning composite fabulous beast: a goat with a lion’s head and a tail of serpents. One might thus be led to believe that the mythical Ancients knew how to calculate and compute, but one would be mistaken. The mythical chimaera was a collage, a patchwork. If Bellerophon, who fought the Chimaera heroically, had kicked it instead of fighting it heroically, its head would have rolled to one side and its tail to another. This is quite different from the newly emerging, true chimaera. One may kick Burson’s Big Brother as often as one likes, he will never disintegrate into Hitler, Mussolini and the others. The new true chimeras are consistent, autonomous phenomena. This is the way with myths: as soon as they become real, they look different from what was expected.

(Source: Vilém Flusser, Nancy Burson. Chimaera, in: Photography after Photography, Hubertus v. Amelunxen, jtly. (eds.), Munich /Amsterdam, 1996, pp.151f.)