The SimpleStream example isn't very suitable as it relies on the classpath. You either have to add the path to the images to the classpath, or to use FileInputStream (and thus certainly not FileReader) to read imags from local disk.
Here's an example of a servlet which does exactly that:
http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/04/imageservlet.html About the JSTL's c:import tag: this is not suitable either. It can only access resources in own context, or the other contexts, or just by an external (absolute) URL.