MINNEAPOLIS—"Soldiers' Faces," a show of portraits of American soldiers scheduled to appear on roadside billboards in Minneapolis next week during the Republican National Convention, has been abruptly canceled by the billboards' owners, reports the Guardian.

The photographs, by Suzanne Opton, show the heads and faces of nine young soldiers laying prone on a flat surface. CBS Outdoor, the company that owns the billboards and is part of the media conglomerate CBS Corporation, feared that passersby would think the soldiers were dead.

"Out of context the images, as stand-alone highway or city billboards, appear to be deceased soldiers," Jodi Senese, CBS Outdoor's executive vice president of marketing, wrote in an e-mail to Susan Reynolds, a curator and collaborator with Opton. "The presentation in this manner could be perceived as being disrespectful to the men and women in our armed forces."

The project is sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts, which signed a contract to pay CBS Outdoor $5,000 to run the images, taken in 2004 and 2005 at New York's Fort Drum with the permission of the soldiers and their commanders, on five billboards in Minneapolis for about a month beginning Monday. The company canceled that contract as well as others in Houston and Miami last week. The images will still appear in Atlanta via another company and are currently on view in Denver, the site of the Democratic National Convention, as well as online. They have previously appeared near Fort Drum in Syracuse, as well as in museums including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

"They don't look dead," said Opton of the images. "It's like you see someone opposite of you with their head on the pillow. We see our lovers and our children in that pose. They look like the heads of fallen statues, and they afford the viewer an intimate look at the face of the young person whose life is at risk, and that was the point."