You, no doubt, have heard that the great World War II photojournalist Joe Rosenthal died Sunday. This is an opportunity to point you toward the back story of his famous picture of the Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. Rosenthal said that, initially, he could not understand what the fuss was about surrounding his photograph.
In Fredrick Voss’ “Reporting the War”
(written in 1994), you will find this passage, which tells the story of how, early
on, some wrongly criticized the now-famous photograph as being “staged”:
When Rosenthal looked back on his eleven days of recording the battle for Iwo Jima,
it was not that image for which he had the greatest professional
fondness. Rather it was one taken in the first hours of the invasion.
Landing on the island’s beaches hard on the heels of the first wave of
marines, Rosenthal had found himself, like the armed men around him,
dodging a stiff barrage of enemy fire.Seeking
picture opportunities while remaining mindful of the need to find
cover, he was darting from shell crater to shell crater when he spotted
the bodies of two dead marines. In that moment, he conceived the idea
for a photograph intended to evoke the essence of what he was
witnessing. Thus, bringing the bodies of the two fallen men into his
camera’s focus, he waited for an advancing marine to come within view,
and when one did, he took a picture that, in his estimation at least,
embodied the “honest ingredients” of what the Iwo Jima story in its
early phases was all about — the dead paving the way so that the living
might follow. [See the less-famous photo here.]
Despite
the forethought that went into that beach picture, the resulting image
did not seemed contrived, which is probably one of the chief reasons
why Rosenthal took special pride in it. On the other hand, his picture
of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi four days later — which, in its
compositional perfection, did seem contrived and led to conjectures by
some that it had to have been carefully posed.
It became, as you know, an icon memoralizing all who died in the Pacific island of Iwo Jima.
The picture that
Rosenthal captured was not the first flag-raising. That took place
before Joe could get to the top of the mountain.
Yes, there was another
flag-raising — and WCCO-TV in Minneapolis produced a documentary about that first flag-raising and the men behind it. If you have not seen this, treat yourself to some great work. In
so many ways, it makes Rosenthal’s photograph on that fateful day even
more remarkable. As you listen to the stories from the Marines about
what the conditions were like during the battle, imagine Rosenthal
there, in the midst of it all, doing what he could to document it with
his camera.
More resources:
- See other Rosenthal works here.
- The Newseum has a section on Rosenthal, too, which includes video interviews.
- The Digital Journalist ran a story on Rosenthal in 2001.
- Eyewitness to History: Raising the Flag Over Iwo Jima
- The U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Va., was designed from Rosenthal’s famous picture.
- The Pacific War Memorial in Hawaii is also designed after the image.
- The California Senate passed an amendment recognizing 60th anniversary of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.
- Rosenthal was awarded the 1945 Pulitzer prize in photography for his famous image.
- You can find Joe Rosenthal’s Wikipedia page here.
