Image scanned from a transparency and color-corrected by Pat Cagney.

Three Major Races

Artist Nancy Burson (American, b. 1948)

Date1982

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsOverall, Image: 9 × 8 1/4 in. (22.9 × 21 cm)
Overall, Support: 11 × 13 3/8 in. (27.9 × 34 cm)
Overall, Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LineGift of Decipher, Inc.

Object number95.5

Terms

Faces

On View

Not on view

DescriptionThis is a composition of the faces of an Asian, a Caucasian, and an African American.

Label TextNancy Burson (with Richard Carling and David Kramlich) American (b. 1948) Three Major Races, 1982 Gelatin-silver print Gift of Decipher, Inc. 95.5 In the late 1960s, Nancy Burson resolved to create a machine that would document the aging process. After nearly a decade of significant progress in the computer engineering field, Burson and scientist Thomas D. Schneider received a United States patent for the age machine process that has been since used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “age” missing persons and construct suspect sketches. Since 1982, Burson and MIT engineers David Kramlich and Richard Carling have advanced this process to produce hybrid portraits that are often politically motivated, occasionally humorous, and always provocative. In this work, Burson combined the faces of three men—an Asian, a Caucasian, and an African-American—into a single image. The resulting portrait is a composite image of a “universal” human, a depiction of no one and everyone. Nearly twenty years later, when the 2000 United States Census Bureau first included expanded racial designations, 6.8 million Americans identified themselves as multiracial.