Poignant Photos Show The Preserved Bedrooms Of Young Fallen Soldiers

After covering the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars for years, Ashley Gilbertson, one of journalism's most respected war photographers, started to think that maybe that understanding wasn't happening as he'd hoped. "I realized people in the United States weren't really engaging with what was taking place there," he tells Slate. After returning to the United States, Gilbertson began looking for a new, potentially more effective way to depict the losses sustained during war.

Gilbertson photographed 40 rooms - the same number of soldiers in a platoon - in the US, Canada, and Europe, creating a body of work which later became the book "Bedrooms of the Fallen," published this year.

Gilbertson decided to document the rooms in black and white to minimize distraction created by color, allowing the viewer to notice all the details, like the posters and teddy bears, signs of the soldier's age at the time of deployment. "That is who we send to fight our wars for us, our children," says Gilbertson.