Mankind

Burson was a pioneer of computer-manipulated photographic portraits in the early 1980s, prior to the advent of Photoshop and other now-popular tools for post-production alterations. The full title of this work is Mankind (An Oriental, a Caucasian, and a Black weighted according to current population statistics). Like much of her work, this image addresses stereotypes, typologies, and the way in which external appearances are instrumentalized in the service of profiling and data collection.

In 1982, she began to collaborate with two MIT engineers, Richard Carling and David Kramlich, to produce images such as this one. They developed a computer program that allowed photographs of faces to be combined pixel by pixel to make new images. In addition to making artworks, the program allowed them to age the human face, which eventually assisted the FBI in locating missing persons. Burson’s work offers an important precedent to the now-widely-acknowledged racial and gender bias in computerized image technologies such as facial recognition software.