Photo by: Joe Rosenthal
KLM flight 457, somewhere over Romania - With no photos to process, and no stories to write yet, I decided to watch a movie. I'm a WWII buff, and I picked Flag of our Fathers, without knowing anything about it except that it was made by Clint Eastwood, and that it is set in WWII.
Little did I know that this is a movie about, a single combat photo. Specifically, the famous picture of the Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. At the beginning of the movie the narrator claims the ability of a photo to win or loose a war, and contrasts the flag raising photo with another famous photo from the Vietnam war of a South Vietnamese officer executing a prisoner with a pistol shot to the head.
The movie was definitely a serendipitous choice, and food for thought. I'm under no delusions that I will ever take a picture this powerful, but it's still a heady reminder that a camera has a power of it's own in war.
But the story is also a cautionary tale about "truth"... The photo actually shows a team of men raising a second replacement flag later in the day, not the original soldiers who were the first to the top of the mountain. The men in the photo became heros, and the men who fought their way to the top of the mountain are virtually unknown.
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