Cast your gaze over aerial gunner Ed Drew’s photographs for just a few seconds and their intriguing and engaging duality becomes readily apparent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The images evoke the long-gone heyday of Civil War tintypes. But they actually depict crew members in Drew’s combat search and rescue unit while he was deployed to Helmand province, Afghanistan, in 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now Drew is at work on his next tintype project that will focus on veterans, giving them a chance to “look in the mirror” \u2014 a reference to the fact that tintype photography creates a reverse “mirror image” of the subject in the frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Drew, the technique, responsible for some of the earliest photographic images in American history, is about making military members “less of a mystery” to the non-military world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The CSAR project “was more about showing the world that we’re more than just a bunch of soldiers in a war machine,” Drew recently told Military Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n