The Power of Pictures in a Time of War
The death last week of Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who made perhaps the most famous photograph of World War II-that of five marines and one Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Iwo Jima-has reignited the wrong debate. For years, rumors have swirled that the image was staged, something no obituary fails to mention. Servicemen had, in fact, flown a flag hours before Rosenthal's arrival. But they soon thought the flag was too small, and Rosenthal was in position to capture the servicemen raising a larger replacement.
Whether that undermines the authenticity of Rosenthal's magnum opus is beside the point. What matters more is why we have elevated this image, staged or not, to iconic status. Equally important pictures emerged from World War II: those of Holocaust victims stacked like logs or those of an obliterated Cologne or Dresden. Yet Rosenthal's photograph is the one we remember. Not because it was the most affecting but because it marked a victory in a cause everyone agreed was just. That's not a sentiment the nation would carry through subsequent wars. Indeed, the imagery we remember follows suit: in Vietnam, a naked, and recently napalmed, 9-year-old girl, her mouth wide, her arms outstretched, her skin scorched; in Somalia, a hog-tied American soldier being dragged through the dirt.
In Iraq, there was a Rosenthal moment, when an American tank in Firdos Square yanked a Saddam statue from its concrete pedestal. Yet the image was soon displaced by darker, more ambiguous ones: Americans torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a mob of Iraqis shooting, burning, lynching four American security workers. Even in Lebanon, the images that stick in the national psyche are not those of Israeli soldiers defending their nation but rather those of lifeless Lebanese children, their bodies being pulled from the rubble.
Rosenthal's image, for all its patriotic grandeur, is a product of the past-a time when wars could be seen, as with Rosenthal's photo, in black and white.
This story appears in the September 5, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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