In the Faces of Patriotism: The Homeless Veterans Project

March 30, 2022 - July 2, 2022

Portraits by Photographer Jerry Tovo
March 30 – July 2, 2022

Statistics don’t have faces.

While statistics about the number of homeless veterans in the United States are staggering, they do not show the people behind the problem. Statistics cannot make visible the toll this epidemic is taking on individual Americans. They cannot express the despair or the determination that lives in these men and women.

St. Louis photographer Jerry Tovo has given voice to these veterans through his photography. Tovo said he hopes these images will help awaken the American conscience.

These images tell the stories behind the statistics, but that does not mean that the numbers should be ignored. On any given night, more than 40,000 U.S. veterans can be found living on the streets or in shelters.

Those statistics, as shocking and saddening as they are, can too easily be ignored. The photographs and stories in this gallery show the price of avoiding this issue – that price is written on the faces of the veterans you see here.

Lecture with Photographer Jerry Tovo

Join us on April 2nd to hear Jerry Tovo speak about his photography and hear some of the stories of the veterans whom he has photographed for his series, In the Faces of Patriotism: The Homeless Veterans Project.

Jerry Tovo has been a commercial photographer and artist in the St. Louis area since the early 1970’s for clients ranging from major retailers such as Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdales, to national corporations, including Anheuser-Busch, Ralston-Purina, and Monsanto. He has created images for advertising campaigns, catalogs and other print media. As a representative for Kodak Professional he worked with professional photographers across the country. As a fine artist, Jerry has developed a unique artistic style incorporating the long tone imagery of the photographic masters with the technology of digital photography to produce evocative, starkly-beautiful and visually-arresting portraiture.

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