Aging at 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70

This video by Nancy Burson comprises five self-portraits taken of herself using makeup in 1976. These were studies Burson conducted when she was first working with MIT’s Media Lab in producing the first aged images by computer. Later, she received a patent along with her co-inventor, Tom Schneider, who designed the first facial grid. This methodology later became known as facial morphing, a technique now used for everything from Snapchat to the most sophisticated AI software.

The American artist Nancy Burson has been using computers since the 1980s to merge photographs of faces with one another to create new, believable, so-called composite faces. In the introduction to the book Composites. Computer Generated Portraits, William A. Ewing and Jeanne A. McDermott call Nancy Burson a photographer who works with concepts and a conceptual artist who works with photographs.