The Making of an Icon: The Iwo Jima Photograph

Joe Rosenthal, whose World War II picture of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima became one of the most iconic photographs of all time, died yesterday in San Francisco at the age of 94.

Rosenthal's AP photo showed five marines and a Navy corpsman raising the flag on Mount Surabachi after the peak had been captured by the Marines in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. (The same scene was captured on film by Marine cameraman Bill Genaust, who was killed on Iwo Jima nine days later.)

It's been called "the most memorable image of American participation in [WWII]," "the single most reproduced photo ever," and "probably the most famous American photograph ever produced."

The image appeared in newspapers around the U.S. within days of the event. It was turned into a War Bond poster, a postage stamp, and, most famously, the giant statue of the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

It was even echoed -- if a picture can be echoed -- in another iconic photo, that of three firefighters raising an American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. (That photo, too, has been turned into a statue.)

Scholars and others have had much to say about the flag-raising photo and its emergence and use as an icon of America and American values. The following are just a few examples:

• Rollins, Peter C. "Iwo Jima: the pains of memory." World and I 13 (6) (1998), 72(6).


• Linenthal, Edward T. "Shaping a heroic presence: Iwo Jima in American Memory." Reviews in American History 21 (1993), 8-12


• Spratt, Meg, April Peterson, and Taso Lagos. "Of photographs and flags: uses and perceptions of an iconic image before and after September 11, 2001." Popular Communication 3 (2) (2005), 117-136.


• Edwards, Janis L. and Carol K. Winkler. "Representative form and the visual ideograph: the Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons." Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 93) (1997) 289+


• Thomey, Tedd. Immortal images : a personal history of two photographers and the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Annapolis, Md. : Naval Institute Press, 1996. (O’Neill Stacks D810.P4 T46 1996)


• Marling, Karal Ann and John Wetenhall. Iwo Jima : monuments, memories, and the American hero. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991 (O’Neill Stacks D767.99.I9 M28 1991 )


• Bradley, James with Ron Powers. Flags of our fathers. New York : Bantam Books, 2000. (O’Neill Stacks D767.99.I9 B73 2000)