Portraits Of Wounded Vets That Are Meant To Be Stared At

“With no shared sacrifices being asked of civilians after Sept. 11"

It's Not Rude: These Portraits Of Wounded Vets Are Meant To Be Stared At

May 25, 2015 - It's impolite to stare. But when it comes to severely injured soldiers, maybe we don't look enough; or maybe we'd rather not see wounded veterans at all.

That's the message you get from photographer David Jay's Unknown Soldier series. Jay spent three years taking portraits of veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but before that — for nearly 20 years — he was a fashion photographer. His stylish, artful images appeared in magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

"The fashion stuff is beautiful and sexy — and completely untrue," he says.

Truth became the focus of Jay's work for the first time about 10 years ago, when he started The SCAR Project, a series of portraits of women, naked from the waist up, with mastectomy scars. Around the time he was taking those photos, he was also trying to comprehend the news coming from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We hear about 'this number of men were killed' and 'this many were injured,'" Jay says, "and we think of them — maybe they got shot — or we don't really picture what these injured men look like." read more>>>

Chris Hayes : "If you can run a deficit to go to war, you can run a deficit to take care of the people who fought it" In response to Republican, long ago lost as the party of Lincoln and not just as to us Veterans, opposition to expanding Veterans' benefits on fiscal grounds

Sen. Bernie Sanders told Conservatives: “If you can’t afford to take care of your veterans, than don’t go war. These people are bearing the brunt of what war is about, We have a moral obligation to support them.” February, 26th, 2014

Neither of these recent wars have yet been paid for, nor the continued blowback from the spread and growth from the policies implemented!
Neither the long term results from, including the long ignored or outright denied existence of, till this Administrations Cabinet and Gen Shinseki, only Government branch consistent for the past six years, Veterans issues from!
As well as under deficits most of the, grossly under funded for decades and the wars from now, VA budget is still borrowed, with interest, thus added problem creating costs, with representative who control the purse strings blaming the mostly dedicated VA personal within, that shouldn't exist!