Chilligavva

Human Statue of Liberty at camp Dodge, Iowa. I happened to Stumble onto it..

For whatever reason, an 89 year old photo taken in Iowa is making its way around the internet. Many people who see the picture find it hard to believe it’s real.
Mike Vogt, curator for the Gold Star Military Museum at Camp Dodge, says they received dozens of e-mails last week questioning if it’s a doctored image.
Vogt says, in fact, it’s a real photo called “The Human Statue of Liberty.” The photo was taken in August 1918 by Arthur Mole.
Vogt says Mole and another photographer, John D. Thomas, traveled the country taking photos of soldiers who were grouped together to form various “patriotic” patterns. Over 18,000 soldiers were used in the Camp Dodge photo that was taken from an 80 foot high tower. Mole and Thomas went to great lengths to make sure the human statue was proportionally correct.
“It’s an interesting exercise in survey and mathematic techniques to have the photographer perched in an 80 foot high tower and have all the soldiers fall in exactly where they needed to be,” Vogt says. In order to give the statue proper perspective, 12,000 men were placed 1,300 feet away from the tower to make up the flame of the torch. Only 2,000 men were needed for the body and head - closer to the tower.
source:Radio Iowa

Naturally I was curious about the photographers, and this is what I could gather about them:

Arthur S. Mole was a British-born commercial photographer who worked in
Zion, Illinois. During and shortly after World War I, Mole traveled
with his partner John D. Thomas from one military camp to another,
posing thousands of soldiers to form gigantic patriotic symbols that
they photographed from above. The formations depicted such images as
the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, the Marine Corps emblem and a
portrait of President Woodrow Wilson. The Wilson portrait, for example,
was formed using 21,000 officers and men at Camp Sherman in Ohio and
stretched over 700 feet. His “Human Liberty Bell” was composed from
over 25,000 soldiers, arranged with Mole’s characteristic attention to
detail to even depict the crack in the bell. Mole and Thomas spent a
week or more preparing for these immense works, which were taken from a
70- or 80-foot tower with an 11- by- 14-inch view camera. When the
demand for these photographs dropped in the 1920s, Mole returned to his
photography business in Zion. Photographs by Mole and Thomas are in the
collections of the Chicago Historical Society, the Museum of Modern Art
and the Library of Congress.
George Glazer Gallery