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Press
Releases
08/21/06
Rosenthal,
photographer who shot Iwo Jima flag-raising, dies at 94
By JUSTIN M. NORTON
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Joe Rosenthal, The Associated Press
photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image
of World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred
Iwo Jima, has died. He was 94.
Rosenthal died Sunday of natural causes at an assisted living
facility in suburban Novato, said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal.
"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity,"
she said.
Rosenthal's iconic photo, shot on Feb. 23, 1945, became the
model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery
in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially
as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines
who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.
The photo was listed in 1999 at No. 68 on a New York University
survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
It shows the second raising of the flag that day on Mount
Suribachi on the Japanese island. The first flag had been
deemed too small.
"What I see behind the photo is what it took to get up
to those heights -- the kind of devotion to their country
that those young men had, and the sacrifices they made,"
Rosenthal once said. "I take some gratification in being
a little part of what the U.S. stands for."
He liked to call himself "a guy who was up in the big
leagues for a cup of coffee at one time."
The picture was an inspiration for Thomas E. Franklin of The
Record of Bergen County, N.J., who took the photo of three
firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade
Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Franklin said he instantly saw the
similarities with the Iwo Jima photo as he looked through
his lens. Franklin's photo, distributed worldwide by the AP,
was a finalist in 2002 for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking
news photography.
The small island of Iwo Jima was a strategic piece of land
750 miles south of Tokyo, and the United States wanted it
to support long-range B-29 bombers and a possible invasion
of Japan.
On Feb. 19, 1945, 30,000 Marines landed on the southeast coast.
Mount Suribachi, at 546 feet the highest point on the island,
took four days for the troops to scale. In all, more than
6,800 U.S. servicemen died in the five-week battle for the
island, and the 21,000-man Japanese defense force was virtually
wiped out.
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.
Standing near Rosenthal was Marine Sgt. Bill Genaust, the
motion picture cameraman who filmed the same flag-raising.
He was killed in combat just days later. A frame of Genaust's
film is nearly identical to the Rosenthal photo.
The AP photo quickly became the subject of posters, war-bond
drives and a U.S. postage stamp.
Rosenthal left the AP later in 1945 to join the San Francisco
Chronicle, where he worked as a photographer for 35 years
before retiring.
"He was short in stature but that was about it. He had
a lot of nerve," said John O'Hara, a retired photographer
who worked with Rosenthal at the San Francisco Chronicle.
O'Hara said Rosenthal took special pride in a certificate
naming him an honorary Marine and remained spry and alert
well into his 90s.
Rosenthal's famous picture kept him busy for years, and he
continued to get requests for prints decades after the shutter
clicked. He said he was always flattered by the tumult surrounding
the shot, but added, "I'd rather just lie down and listen
to a ball game."
"He was the best photographer," said friend and
fellow Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Nick Ut of The
Associated Press, who said he spoke with Rosenthal last week.
"His picture no one forgets. People know the photo very
well."
Ut's 1972 image of a little girl, naked and screaming in agony
as she flees a napalm bomb attack during the Vietnam War,
stoked anti-war sentiment. But Rosenthal's photo helped fuel
patriotism in the United States.
"People say to me, yours is so sad. You see his picture
and it shows how Americans won the war," Ut said.
Rosenthal was born in 1911 in Washington, D.C.
He took up photography as a hobby. As the Depression got under
way, Rosenthal moved to San Francisco, living with a brother
until he found a job with the Newspaper Enterprise Association
in 1930.
In 1932, Rosenthal joined the old San Francisco News as a
combination reporter and photographer.
"They just told me to take this big box and point the
end with the glass toward the subject and press the shutter
and `We'll tell you what you did wrong,'" he said.
After a short time with ACME Newspictures in San Francisco
in 1936, Rosenthal became San Francisco bureau chief of The
New York Times-Wide World Photos.
Rosenthal began working for the AP in San Francisco when the
news cooperative bought Wide World Photos. After a stint in
the Merchant Marine, he returned to the AP and was sent to
cover battle areas in 1944.
His first assignment was in New Guinea, and he also covered
the invasion of Guam before making his famous photo on Iwo
Jima.
In addition to his daughter, Rosenthal is survived by his
ex-wife Lee Rosenthal, his son Joseph J. Rosenthal Jr., and
their families.
___
Associated Press Writer Greg Risling in Los Angeles contributed
to this report.
___
On the Net:
More on Rosenthal: http://www.newseum.org/warstories/interviews/mov/journalists/bio.asp?ID32
AP Video: Capturing
Iwo Jima: Remembering Joe Rosenthal
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