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

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

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."