Copyright 2004 The American Prospect, Inc.  
The American Prospect
June, 2004
SECTION: DEVIL IN THE DETAILS; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 460 words

HEADLINE: The Faces of Honor, the Face of Shame

BYLINE: TARA MCKELVEY

BODY:
JOE WEZOREK, A 31-YEAR-old computer programmer who lives in Pittsburgh, is a fan of the photo-realist artist Chuck Close. Wezorek even traveled to Washington in 1998 to see Close's paintings, which are based on grids made of woodblock, silk screen, and other material and are blurry when you look at them.

"The farther you are from his work, the more clear the composite picture is," says Wezorek. "When you're closer, the elements that make up the picture are more clear."

And when Wezorek came across a recent CNN.com story about the Iraq War that showed a grid of Army soldiers, Marines, and others killed there -- with all of their photos cropped to the same-sized rectangle -- he thought, "Someone is going to use them in a mosaic of the president."

"And then I thought, 'I'm going to do it,'" he says.

Wezorek started the project on a Sunday afternoon. First, he copied off the Web site the photos of 609 men and women killed in Iraq. Then he made a grid with 30 columns in 47 rows. He used a total of 1,410 photos (some are repeated) for the portrait and called it "War President." With the help of the Mosaic Creator computer software, he finished the portrait in about three hours.

On April 4, he posted it on American Leftist, a "third-tier blog," as he puts it, that he'd started just over three months earlier. (Wezorek grew up in a middle-class home and turned radical after reading Noam Chomsky at MIT and discovering, after he graduated, that you really can't work part time at a bookstore and survive. "I was very naive," he says.)

The work's appeal, however, is scarcely limited to Chomskyites. Michael Moore's site picked up "War President." So did Tom Tomorrow's. Articles appeared in British newspapers, including the The Daily Mirror, which described it as "Dubya's death mask," and the Daily Mail, which said it's the kind of "portrait that world leaders dread." Along with an article about Wezorek, the The Independent published a Tony Blair mosaic of photographs of 55 British troops who died in Iraq. Wezorek's blog, which had averaged 100 visitors a day, started drawing 10,000.

Not everybody was thrilled.

"I am a 1st Sergeant in the United States Army, just recently returned from a tour in Iraq. Some of the soldiers in that mosaic were my friends," wrote someone who identifies himself as Cadet Sergeant Hurtt. "You have NO RIGHT to use photographs of soldiers killed in action to express your twisted opinions."

"I apologize for any additional pain that this image causes," says Wezorek. "But I don't think it was morally wrong to [make this image]. Obviously I think the [subject of the] composite image of who's depicted there is responsible for the deaths of the others."

GRAPHIC: Picture, Face the Nation: Artist Joe Wezorek's "War President", JOE WEZOREK

LOAD-DATE: May 27, 2004