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Although Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
was initially—like the war itself—deeply controversial, it quickly became a
place of pilgrimage, grief, and meditation. Shortly after it opened, Judith Joy
Ross began photographing at the site—not the polished black granite walls
inscribed with the names of the dead, but rather the faces of those who came to
pay tribute to the fallen and ponder the cost of war. A portraitist of uncommon
sensitivity, Ross photographed visitors using a large-format camera and a
shallow depth of field that isolated her subjects in their own worlds of
thought.