Platon's Pics: un worldly

I followed the link on the converse add done by Platon, it led to a New Yorker article about Planton's recent photographing of american soldiers in a before and after kind of style.

These two I picked out to represent the most and least realistic looking of Platon's photos. The sailor appears, to me, to be nearly normal other than B&W, and some fuzzy background and otherwise somewhat 'aged photo' looking. The gun-toting soldier looks un real, intensely detailed so the gun barrel seems to be poking me in the face but also my eye cannot firgure out the depth so it also looks like a flat drawing.
This erry effect is even stranger on the human faces in the other photos through the link. The wedding picture creeps me out even more than this soldier (I wonder if I can put that pic in the middle of this post...Woo you can click and drag photos! OK, anyway,
I know in my head this is a wedding and a happy time, but this looks as happy as a funeral being broken up by the SS.