COLLECTOR’S CHOICE - Five Self-Portraits at Ages 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70 by Nancy burson
"Five Self-Portraits at Ages 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70" by Nancy Burson is a conceptual study of identity and aging. Created in collaboration with MIT in the late 1970s, the series presents five portraits of Burson, in which she envisioned how her face might change at different ages. This work laid the conceptual groundwork for her pioneering age-morphing technology, influencing both her own artistic practice and the development of facial manipulation techniques used today.
Aging at 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70, 1976, video work
Motion pictures and animations often use morphing techniques to create seamless transitions between images. This geometric interpolation method has existed for centuries, with early examples like tabula scalata and mechanical transformations. One of the earliest and most effective techniques was “dissolving,” developed in the 19th century, where images gradually transitioned, for example, a landscape shifting from day to night.
Aging at 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70, 1976, fine art prints
A pioneering figure in this field was Nancy Burson, an American artist and photographer born in 1948, who was the first artist to use digital morphing technology in art. Burson became interested in digital technology in the 1970s after visiting the 1968 exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at Museum of ModernArt. The show inspired her to explore technological processes in her own practice.
Portrait of Nancy Burson
During this time, Nancy Burson envisioned software that could age a user's face. In 1976, she contacted Nicholas Negroponte at MIT, where she began working with the Architecture Machine Group. At MIT, researchers had recently developed a rudimentary digitizer that allowed a computer to process and manipulate facial images, and with Thomas Schneider, they started working on Nancy’s idea.
The set up at MIT which was their first version of a digitizer
The foundation for this pioneering age-morphing technology was laid with the work “Five Self-Portraits at Ages 18, 30, 45, 60, and 70”. Created in 1976, this piece features five portraits of Nancy Burson at different ages. For this series, Burson worked together with a makeup artist to envision how she might appear in the future.
Documentation of the Aging Self Portraits, 1976, vintage mounted photograph
This work, along with other studies she created of herself, allowed her to explore the aging process and contributed to the development of the software, which she patented in 1981 as “The Method and Apparatus for Producing an Image of a Person’s Face at a Different Age”.
Aging Study, 1976, drawing
The software simulated the aging process by scanning the viewer’s face, allowing them to interactively adjust data points for features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. An aging template would then apply transformations corresponding to the viewer’s facial structure. This triangular grid remains the standard morphing grid in the industry today, used in AI software and applications like Snapchat.
Using this software, Nancy Burson altered the faces of celebrities, models, and even a Barbie doll to address broader social and political themes. She later created the “Age Machine”, an interactive work where visitors could see future versions of themselves. Her research had implications beyond the art world. Law enforcement agencies adopted her technology to create age-progressed images of missing children, aiding in their identification and recovery.
Her work has been exhibited in major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the MET Museum, the Whitney Museum, the V&A Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. Currently, pieces from her oeuvre are on view in LACMA’s exhibition “Digital Witness”