Webloggin » Another Legend Passes

Joe Rosenthal shot the iconic Iwo Jima photograph that shows the Marines raising the second flag on that blood-soaked island. As Rosenthal made clear, this was not a posed photograph; it was not false propaganda:

Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost didn’t go up to the summit when he learned a flag had already been raised. He decided to go up anyway, and found servicemen preparing to plant the second, larger flag.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don’t come away saying you got a great shot. You don’t know.”

“Millions of Americans saw this picture five or six days before I did, and when I first heard about it, I had no idea what picture was meant.”

He recalled that days later, when a colleague congratulated him on the picture, he thought he meant another, posed shot he had taken later that day, of Marines waving and cheering at the base of the flag.

He added that if he had posed the flag-raising picture, as some skeptics have suggested over the years, “I would, of course, have ruined it” by choosing fewer men and making sure their faces could be seen.

Joe Rosenthal died this weekend. Unbeknownst to be, he was living in my neck of the woods when he died. life. It’s totally silly and illogical way, but that fact makes me feel just a little bit proud. It’s my own “six degrees of separation” with someone who preserved a moment of extraordinary heroism and patriotism.

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