Pardon Me

On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford granted a "full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon" for "offenses against the United States."

Ford characterized Watergate as "an American tragedy in which we all have played a part." The pardon decision was wrenching and controversial. In May 2001, Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award for his action.

Nancy Burson's portrait, The President (second version), blends the facial features of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and three presidential successors—Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.

In the early 1980s, Nancy Burson and her husband, David Kramlick, concocted software that allowed Burson to isolate individual features from photographic portraits and mix them in a seamless way to create new faces, faces with a gloss of realism but an uncanny peculiarity about them.…

Since the blends somehow always ended up as a recognizable human face, the odd progeny of digital interbreeding, the message seemed obvious: Political differences are less important than behavioral similarities.

Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Pictured: Nancy Burson, born 1948, The President (second version), 1988, Polaroid print on paper, 24 3/4 x 19 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through Smithsonian Institution Special Exhibition Fund.