Untitled, from the series "The Marine Machine"

William Mares, a former Marine and lawyer turned pho-tographer, documented the 10-week transition of young men into soldiers at his own boot camp, Parris Island. Hugh Edwards exhibited this photographic essay, which appealed to his sense of humanism, at the Art Institute in 1970. To Edwards the work was “free of present-day propagandas of one side or another.” While many of the other photographs depict common scenes of recruits training, eating, and showering, this image crystallizes the poetic and poignant moment in which a civilian sheds his hair and individuality to become a Marine.