From Accipiter: Both of the WWII pictures of people raising flags (the one American, and the one Soviet) are sort of hoaxes.  The Iwo Jima one shows the raising of the second American flag on the mountain.  There is a picture of the first one that I see every now and then; it shows a group of troops standing around the pole while in the foreground another man with a rifle keeps watch.  The first flag had been raised something like two hours before the second one, but it was taken down (partly because it was too small, partly because various people wanted it as a souvenier).  Then the one in that more famous picture was raised.  So it wasn

The migrant mother one is photoshopped, I believe the original can be found on this site
(It’s in the Hippo eats Dwarf book too I think)

I think Acci covered my thoughts on the Iwo Jima one
Though I think the photo is still famous even if staged

I’m sort of glad that guy commited suicide after leaving that starving child to fend for itself.
As for the photographer who left the girl to die in the water….

Some of these photo’s just don’t belong.

I think Acci covered my thoughts on the Iwo Jima one
Though I think the photo is still famous even if staged

It really, really, really wasn’t staged. Sorry to keep going on and on about it, but staged means “posed.” Staged means “faked.” It was neither. It’s real. It is exactly what it appears to be: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising a flag over Iwo Jima and a photographer happened to catch the magical moment. As the photographer himself said over and over again—it just broke his heart when people called it “staged,” which is I guess why I do keep going on and on about it—if he’d staged it, he would have ruined it.

Kathleen

I get that you’re debating with other people’s views on the Iwo Jima picture, Kathleen.
But really - there’s no need to explain what staged means. People here understand.

From Boo: But really - there

Well, we’ve got a few nutters about the place, if you fancy a crack at them.

Kathleen - 07 June 2007 09:15 PM

Your memory of the Iwo Jima flag raising is largely accurate

Well, it’s not my memory of the Iwo Jima flag raising, but rather my memory of what I saw and heard about it.  I’m not quite that old. 

but I still don’t think it’s fair to call it a “hoax,” or even a “sort of” hoax. But I guess that’s kind of a judgment call. The way I look at it, it is an actual flag being raised at Iwo Jima, it wasn’t staged, it was raised under conditions of enormous danger (two-thirds of the island or something like that was still under Japanese control), and the fact that it is the second flag bothers me not at all and changes the significance not at all.

That’s why I said that it was sort of a hoax, in that it really did happen, but it’s not really what a lot of people think it is.

The first flag raising wasn’t photographed at all, if I remember correctly, for the simple reason that there was no photographer there—it was horribly dangerous, so the guys just ran up there, stuck a flag in the ground, and beat it.

I found a copy of the picture of the first flag that I was thinking of.  As you can see, it was a lot smaller than the second one.  That’s the one that they put up there to show that they’d taken the top (although not quite secured it).

The posed photo that you mention of troops standing around the flag was actually shot just after the famous one, not before (if I remember correctly). It was the one that the photographer assumed would be used because he had no idea the famous one would turn out so perfectly. (If I remember correctly—forgive my using that phrase so often—he didn’t even have time to focus, or at least not much. It was just like—“Look, quick, they are raising the flag.”) Remember, he was just sending raw, undeveloped film back behind the lines so he didn’t know what he had until much later.

Heh. . .this posed photo that you’re talking about is the one that I don’t recall ever seeing before.

From Accipitor: Heh. . .this posed photo that you

Kathleen - 07 June 2007 09:47 PM

...But really, maybe I should stick with what I know best, which is being articulate but somewhat reiterative. I’m so good at it.

So are the nutters. Well, other than the articulate part.

Boo - 07 June 2007 10:10 PM

So are the nutters. Well, other than the articulate part.

Well, I shall endeavor to avoid reiterating to a nutter-like level then. Thanks for the word of warning! And if I do occasionally begin to verge on nutterosity, you have my promise that I will nonetheless (1) punctuate properly, (2) eschew writing in all caps, and (3) forswear telling anybody, even a real nutter, that he or she “sucks.”

Kathleen - 07 June 2007 11:02 PM

And if I do occasionally begin to verge on nutterosity, you have my promise that I will nonetheless (1) punctuate properly, (2) eschew writing in all caps, and (3) forswear telling anybody, even a real nutter, that he or she “sucks.”

Hurrah! In that case, welcome to the forum.