Leonard Pitts on DADT: Where would you be without your face?

Jeff Sheng

Photographer Jeff Sheng's newest project, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, was spurred, he said in an email to NPR, by service members who had played sports in high school and/or college and had seen his earlier project, Fearless.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell is an exhibit of about 60 portraits Sheng has taken in 25 states.

Columnist Leonard Pitts had the following to say about the photographs in a recent column:

Look at these pictures.
     Look at what isn't there, at what the images withhold. You see the figures. But always, a hand is raised, a shadow intervenes, a head is turned, the top of the body is cropped away, and you are denied what you instinctively seek: identity. You are denied their faces.
     What's going on here? Don't ask, don't tell.

From Jeff Sheng's Fearless project

Sheng's earlier project, Fearless, about out high school and college athletes, was the subject of a piece by Charlie Gibson of ABC news.