Chamblee54

This a story of war, and pictures. There are two groups of pictures. The people in these pictures are all deceased because of war.
A lady named Kaziah Hancock lives on a goat farm in Utah. She renders oil portraits of soldiers who have died in foreign wars. The pictures are based on photographs of the soldiers, while still alive. The portraits are shipped to the family of the soldier.
Eight time zones away, there is a “pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing , where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens.” Families come here to look for relatives, to try learn about their loved ones.
The pictures are not based on a photograph from happier times. “No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, “Mother, where is happiness?” The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him.”
In the story quoted here, the mother of 5061 identified him as her son. “No. 5061 was Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, father, son and brother. At 9 a.m., on that Sunday, Aug. 15, his family left the morgue in a white Nissan and set out to find his body in a city torn between remembering and forgetting, where death haunts a country neither at war nor peace.”
Pictures for this feature are from The Library of Congress.