What the photograph shows
This extraordinary historical photograph captures a colossal living portrait of US President Woodrow Wilson, meticulously assembled from exactly 21,000 soldiers and officers standing in formation. Viewed from a sharp elevated perspective, the mass of uniformed men resolves into an unmistakable, detailed profile of the wartime president, complete with his signature eyeglasses, facial structure, and tailored suit jacket. Every contour is formed by human bodies packed tightly together across the dusty earth of a military training camp, demonstrating an astonishing feat of human geometry and mass choreography.
The moment behind the image
The photograph was captured in 1918 at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, as the United States mobilized millions of troops for deployment to the Western Front of the First World War. Creating such an image required days of grueling physical preparation under strict military discipline. Photographer Arthur Mole and his business partner John Thomas spent a week or more surveying and staking out the ground with measuring tapes, calculating precise mathematical angles to distort human bodies into a flat two-dimensional likeness when viewed from above. On the day of the shoot, thousands of servicemen stood for hours under the open sun while Mole balanced atop a rickety 75-foot wooden camera tower, shouting positioning directions through a megaphone until the optical illusion snapped into perfect perspective.
Photographer and provenance
The image was conceived and executed by Arthur Mole, an English-born commercial photographer from Chicago, alongside his photographic partner John Thomas. Mole had immigrated to the United States around the turn of the century and settled in the utopian religious community of Zion, Illinois, before establishing his photographic career. Following America’s entry into World War I in 1917, Mole secured access to 18 military training camps across the United States. His objective was to produce dramatic patriotic photographs that countered isolationist sentiments and boosted domestic morale. This specific Woodrow Wilson portrait was widely printed and distributed as commemorative photographic postcards, entering public consciousness as a potent symbol of wartime unity before fading into obscurity for decades until Mole’s appearance on the television game show I’ve Got A Secret in 1962.
Historical context
In the historical context of 1918, Mole’s “living photographs” functioned as a novel and powerful genre of wartime propaganda. Art historians and cultural critics, such as Louis Kaplan, have noted that these mass spectacles captured an era of heightened patriotic fervor and collective national self-consciousness. Yet, beneath their surface display of democratic solidarity lies a profound paradox. To create an iconic symbol like the presidential profile or a soaring American flag, the individual identity of every participating soldier had to be completely suppressed. The men became interchangeable pixels in a grand optical illusion. This total subordination of the individual to a collective national symbol carries complex visual echoes, bridging the gap between early 20th-century patriotic pageantry and the chilling mass choreographies of later totalitarian regimes.
Why it still matters
Decades after the last soldier stepped out of formation at Camp Sherman, Arthur Mole’s living photographs continue to fascinate viewers through their haunting duality. They stand as remarkable technical achievements in pre-digital panoramic photography and optical perspective, capturing the immense organizational power of the American military machine during the First World War. At the same time, they prompt enduring questions about the nature of patriotism, mass psychology, and the erasure of individual humanity in service of collective state iconography.