Nancy Burson at Grey Art Gallery - New York

Missing child Etan Patz was six years old when he disappeared from the streets of SoHo in 1979, but five years later, artist Nancy Burson created a photograph of the lost boy as a 13-year-old, using her groundbreaking "aging" software, a program that shows how a face might change over time. The image caught the attention of the FBI (which has since used the program to recover missing children) and earned her acclaim for making "art that changes lives." For better or for worse, Burson embraced this problematic title and adopted it as the guiding principle for all of her future projects.

"Seeing and Believing," the midcareer survey of Burson's photographic and multimedia projects organized by the Grey Art Gallery, offered up this artist's belief system as integral to the work on view, often asking the audience to take more than a little leap of faith. At the outset of her career, Burson was a pioneer in the field of digital art, collaborating with engineers at MIT as early as 1979. As one of the first artists to use computers to alter photographs, Burson created what she called "composite portraits," morphing images of world leaders and movie stars into frightening and funny neo-icons. Her finest work of this period is the 1988-90 series of computer-generated androids, shot in large-format Polaroid film from a computer screen, a process which made these impossible faces seem disturbingly real.

But, by the early 1990s, Burson switched her mission from championing new technology to acting as a guardian for individuals whose real faces matched her scary digital creations: children born with cranial defects and, later, individuals whom the artist deemed "androgynous." Reverting to conventional photography, the artist insists we look at these people as embodiments of the limitations of science and technology. However, these heartfelt images are too maudlin to serve any documentary purpose and often come off as unintentionally condescending. Likewise, Burson's most recent work, "The Healers," a series of photographs of individuals who believe they have the power to cure, takes the legitimacy of faith healing for granted. Again using unaltered photography, Burson expects viewers to share her belief in the evidentiary value of her work, while offering little proof of her subjects' supposed magical powers in the prints on view.

In Burson's new world view, belief supplants sight as the raison d'etre for art, a proposition that is particularly disturbing in her most popular project, The Human Race Machine. Installed in a black box reminiscent of a photo-booth, viewers are invited to morph their features into various racial types--Caucasian, Asian or African-American--on a computer screen. (At the Grey, the booth also offered the Age Machine or the Couples Machine as options.) While steeped in the artist's sincere belief in humanity, this project cannot be considered without acknowledging its dangerous roots in phrenology and other morphologically based pseudosciences, or the freak-show qualities that lie at the heart of its popularity.

By insisting that photography and new media have the potential to change the world, Burson has bravely chosen to follow her own path. But by refusing to see that beauty and truth and even universal humanism are subject to multiple interpretations, Burson short-circuits the potential power of these worthwhile projects.

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