"The military does this amazing job of creating warriors," said Joanna. "But in that process, something is lost."

For the Gilbertson's, these soldiers were "somebody" before they went to war, and their sacrifice deserved memorializing. Ashley, like many photographers at the time, had tried to photograph military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, but even these images lacked something.

At the Look3 photography festival in 2006, Joanna was attracted to a particular photograph. This time it was a picture of a closet, empty, save a single hanging dress. "It captured the things people left behind," Joanna remembered. She thought it was powerful in its simplicity.

"Photographers need to create stories that are ... digestible," Gilbertson once told me, quickly adding that he hates that word. "But those stories have to remind this country that we're actually at war."

Photographing empty bedrooms, the living mausoleums of American men and women killed in a foreign war, was visually powerful without being graphic. The images were humble. But most importantly for Ashley, they were human.

"Photographs of a thousand more bloody soldiers won't change anything," he said. "I can't make [the public] care about the war by bashing them over the head with it."

But the Bedrooms project also provided Joanna, after years of waiting, an opportunity to be part of the profession that nearly tore the two of them apart.

"The first time he went was a disaster," said Joanna. She told Ashley that the project was important for his healing, and promised she would always be there for him, but would never accompany him on the shoots.

Gilbertson spent more than six months talking with the family of Thomas Gilbert, learning everything he could about him. More importantly, the time allowed him to gain the family's trust to photograph the bedroom; the last surviving memorial to their son. The result, Gilbertson said, was the most authentic war photography he'd every shot.

Today, sitting in his basement office with a half-finished beer on his desk, Gilbertson can still see three medium-sized, black and white prints of his most recent bedrooms shoots on his bookshelf.

The past few weeks had produced an initial draft of his upcoming photography book. Between the two covers, more than 40 separate bedrooms of soldiers from around the world would be displayed, with Ashley's own writing filling in the white spaces.

"I'm doing the best I can because someone paid for my life with theirs." Gilbertson said, before taking another swig of his beer. "Bedrooms of the Fallen is my apology."

Overexposed: A Photographer's War Against PTSD from Adam McCauley on Vimeo

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