service personnel and their families would find pictures of the dead featuring on stamps "distressing and disrespectful". However the stamps have received support from families, the general public and members of the armed forces. McQueen said "An official set of Royal Mail stamps struck me as an intimate but distinguished way of highlighting the sacrifice of individuals in defence of our national ideals. The stamps would focus on individual experience without euphemism. It would form an intimate reflection of national loss that would involve the families of the dead and permeate the everyday – every household and every office." The work premiered in the Great Hall at Central Library, Manchester in March 2007, between then and July 2010 it toured the UK. McQueen considers the work incomplete until the stamps are released to the public, to that end a petition was created to gather support for the issuing of the stamps which had acquired 26,673 signatures by July 2010. References External links Queen and Country at Art Fund official site Topical postage stamps War art Collection of the Imperial War Museum Works about the Iraq War