This MFA thesis addresses work completed and presented in a thesis exhibition at West Virginia University. It expresses the personal motivations, the process and the inspirations behind the exhibit. Through the use of abstraction, I was searching for a personal change in perspective, and a way to identify with people on a level that mirrors my long-term experience in the military. This was explored by uniformly adding Adobe Photoshop filters, in a step by step manner, to a selected series of portraits., to a selected series of portraits. The hope was by removing the surface characteristics of an individual what was left would add humanity to the faceless crowd, or the they .