Nancy Burson’s Seeing and Believing gathers roughly two decades of a practice that has always treated the photographic portrait as something provisional. The book, published by Twin Palms in 2002 with an essay by Michael L. Sand, surveys three phases. From 1979 to 1991 Burson used the computer to build faces that do not exist: composites, age-progressed portraits, and deliberate facial anomalies. From 1991 to 1995 she photographed what she calls “special faces” — children and adults whose features have been changed by disease, nature, or circumstance. From 1996 onward her projects braid the fantastical, an uneasy relationship with science, and a sense of spiritual connection among living things.

What distinguishes the volume is the sequence of that career. Burson reached for the computer before she took up straight photography, reversing the order most of her contemporaries followed as digital tools entered their studios. The later work then holds both strategies at once, and the book lets a reader watch that negotiation rather than merely reading about it. Sand’s essay supplies the connective argument; the plates carry the harder evidence.

Collectors of postwar and contemporary photography have reason to keep this title in view. Burson’s manipulated portraits belong to the early history of digital imaging in art, and a single volume that traces the shift from algorithmic faces to direct portraiture, then to their combination, documents an unusual trajectory with unusual clarity. The 95 four-color plates are printed at 9 by 12 inches, a scale that suits faces meant to be examined closely.

It is also a book about belief — about what a viewer is willing to accept as a face, and what a photograph is willing to claim as true. That question has only become more insistent since 2002.