From a distance they're just pictures of a flag, or an eagle, or the Liberty Bell. But look again . . . Only when you get closer do you realize that these images are actually formed by people. Here, 100 officers and 9,000 enlisted men at Parris Island formed the Marine Corps' symbol.
Unbelievably, it took 30,000 men at Camp Custer in Battle Creek, Mich., for this "human shield" photo created by photographers Arthur Mole and John Thomas in 1918. Frank Maresca, owner of New York's Ricco/Maresca Gallery, told CBS News correspondent Serena Altschul this picture holds the record for the largest number of people posing in a picture: "From the tip of the shield to the bottom of the stars you might have 2,000 people. But if you are talking about the last row of stars, you would probably have 20,000 people at least, just in the last row." That's because to maintain proper perspective, many more men had to be placed in the distance than up close.
Mole and Thomas lived outside Chicago, and started off shooting religious images with members of their church. Later, soldiers on military bases volunteered for the cause. Here, 25,000 officers and men at New Jersey's Fort Dix form the Liberty Bell (with crack).
Most of the people in the Mole/Thomas photos create military formations of American symbols. "Mole and Thomas were just patriotic people," Maresca said.
Using a special camera which had huge 11- x 14-inch negatives, they took pictures perched atop custom-built towers 80 feet high. "Pretty rickety structures," Maresca called them. In this image taken at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Ia., the huddled masses number 15,000 for Lady Liberty's flame and torch, and just 17 for the base. The camera was a quarter-mile away.
Mole and Thomas popularized this form of photography at the beginning of World War I, and the "living pictures" caught on. Between the two World Wars, other photographers like E.O. Goldbeck took them, too. This Goldbeck image features the Hawaiian Division - Schofield Barracks in 1926.
Uniforms of different colors were used to fashion the light or dark details, turning the soldiers into human pixels. No Photoshop! Marseca explained that for this image of President Woodrow Wilson, the white area of the president face is made up of soldiers lucky enough to be wearing their white regulation Army issue T-shirts, while those making up the hair are in their Army regulation wool most unfortunate as it was 105 degrees at the time.
A closeup of part of this machine gun insignia image taken at Camp Hancock in Augusta, Ga.
It didn't take just 22,500 officers and men to create this Machine Gun Insignia. It also took 600 machine guns!
Bluejackets at the U.S. Naval Training Station in Pelham Bay, New York, here form the "Living Allied Flags."
An eagle as formed by 12,500 officers, nurses and men at Camp Gordon in Atlanta, Ga. Mole and Thomas donated some of the proceeds from the sale of their photographs to returning servicemen, and to their church proof that one picture can be worth at least a thousand words, particularly if it's made up of many thousands of people.