This composite image includes 1087 portraits of the first 1121 American soldiers killed in Iraq from March 2003 to October 2004. In order to create this work, I scoured the internet for the best possible photo of each individual soldier, then aligned the eyes and mouth of each portrait with the preceding photos before compositing them into a single work.
As I went through the list of fatalities, time and again I encountered the personal accounts of friends, family and loved ones. Each parent's final conversation, every friend's happy recollection, the lonely words of widowed spouses and the bewildered questions of fatherless children tore into my heart and left me, more often than not, in tears. As I looked into the pixelized eyes of each of these selfless warriors, I wondered what their plans had been - I wondered where they would be now if not for the war.
This is the face of America's sacrifice, the face of more than a thousand families' pain. Do you recognize it?
This image was created by compositing (combining, layering) groups of exisiting photographs (or other images) into a single work. The process is achieved by manually aligning each image, then scanning and layering them using custom written software. The intent of these works is to discover the patterns, trends and truth that may be collectively found in the vocabulary of the photographic arts.
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