First and Second Beauty Composites (Left: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe. Right: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, Meryl Streep),

1982

My patent on the aging of faces by computer was issued in 1981. The Beauty Composites were one of the first amalgams my collaborators and I made in 1982, using bootlegged equipment only available for our use on nights and weekends. It took twenty-five minutes to warp each face into the composite, so we would spend a couple of sleepless nights at a time running the earliest version of what came to be known as facial morphing software.

For me, these images were about the passage of time in relationship to changes in styles. Some say you can tell the amount of power given to women in their culture by the thickness or thinness of their brows. In terms of this truly unscientific study, the thinner, arched eyebrows and heavily made-up lips of the 1950s beauties contrasted with the thicker, less plucked, more generic brows that emerged by the 1980s.

Nancy Burson