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| 5/17 |
| 2006/8/10-14 [Consumer/Camera] UID:43957 Activity:moderate |
8/10 Categories and examples of photo fraud. Best I've seen so far:
http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud
\_ I agree photo manip is bad, but it seems really minor.
I'll just make up a scale, it seems like the horrific
bombing of civilians (yes I am well aware Hezbollah
sticks their operations deliberately in densely packed
civilian apt buildings), is 5 percent worse in the
doctored photographs.
\_ That's not the point. Regardless of who is right or wrong,
an organ that is supposed to report as impartial a picture as
possible is distributing pretty bad misinformation that
can be misinterpreted as propaganda. All the "dude, you trust
the news?" stupidity aside, I expect outfits like Reuters to
use a minimal amount of good judgment when providing
news photos. -John
\_ http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2006/08/09/080906-950x315-badreporter.gif
\_ I'm not Hezbollah supporter. I think Israel has the right to
defend itself. I think Israel fucked up majorly by not
making a fuss when Iran/Hezbollah moved all those rockets
into Lebanon. I think they fucked up again when they
wildly overreacted to the kidnapping of the 2 soldiers,
and showing the world that their amazing military is not
quite as unbeatable as they have led the world to believe.
\_ link:tinyurl.com/jtpxk (sfgate.com)
\_ http://img145.imageshack.us/my.php?image=20060806godzillarutoh9.jpg
\_ http://tinyurl.com/gg94m (img145.imageshack.us)
\- do you consider a POSED photograph [like the Iwo Jima
Flag one] to be the moral equiv of manipulation if it
isnt disclosed that it is posed? i think there is something
to be said for asthetic and editorial manipulation ...
aesthetic might disqulaify you from winning an award,
but i really didnt see the big deal with the photoshopped
smoke one [i think the employer has a right to be pissed
off because that wasnt disclosed, but i dont think there
is much of a "bigger picture" issue, so to speak ... in
the case of the smoke one, i dont see what the *public*
outrage is about.]. --psb, combat photographer
http://home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/PSB_MISC/PSB_Nikon-Muj1.jpg
\_ There is a small but important semantic difference. The
Iwo pic is a "hey, great, look at us" shot. The dead
baby ones are "grr, what injustice, get angry!" shots.
I'd rather compare the staged pics in effect to the
naked running girl or dying republican soldier than the
Iwo flag pics. As to your question about cropping and
other cosmetic edits, IMHO it becomes inacceptable when
the staging/edit is clearly designed to provoke a
certain emotional response in the viewer--at that point
it becomes propaganda. Cosmetic edits just sort of
cheapen the aesthetic effect of any picture purporting
to convey a "this is authentic" message. -John
\_ The public is rightfully outraged because the public
rightfully gets pissed off when fed lies, distortions
and propaganda. It is bad enough when the headlines are
misleading, don't match the articles or are just
outright lies but pictures are held to a higher standard
because there is limited ability to fake things with
pictures without photoshop compared to text. The
written word is subject to personal experience,
interpretation, various biases intentional and not, and
ability to write clearly and concisely. A picture can
be cropped, the brightness or colors can be changed a
bit, that's understood. But the objects and people
should be real, not complete fabrications from photoshop
or razor and glue. The written word can be analysed,
compared to other sources and past work of the author.
The author's history is also subject to debate and
analysis. A picture is a moment in time and often it is
the only record of an event with little else to compare
against. When we can't believe our own eyes, what can
we believe? I don't understand how this isn't obvious
to you. I have too much respect for you to
automatically assume the negative regarding your
position on this. Can you please elaborate on your
thoughts regarding faked photos?
\_ Are Ansel Adams' photos "faked" because he
extensively modified them (invented a new system
to do so) between negative and print? A photograph
can never capture what the photographer was seeing,
and we view photographs differently than we view
real objects, so the emotional impact is different.
I don't think there's anything wrong with seeing
a teddy bear in the rubble of a destroyed building
and positioning it so it photographs better;
the photographer is trying to convey is the feeling
the photographer is trying to convey the feeling
of being there, not the precise location of a
particular teddy bear. -tom
\_ Actually, unless the teddy photographer is taking
the photo for its pure artistic value, he shouldn't
touch it. There is a huge difference between Ansel
Adams photos and, say, Robert Capa war photos in
terms of the message they convey. With an AA
pic, the editing is part of the overall artistic
presentation, while a war photo is supposed to
show things as they are, period. Anything more
is questionable at best. -John
\_ I acknowledge the difference between Adams
and a photojournalist, but I don't think a
photojournalist must never touch anything.
Again, the purpose of photojournalism is
to capture what it was like to be there,
not to minutely document a particular event.
If composing a photo can improve the
journalist's ability to make the photo
convey an impression, I don't think it's wrong
to do so. Bringing your own teddy bear would
be wrong. Cloning in more smoke to make it
look worse than it was is wrong. But
touching things is not inherently wrong. -tom
\_ The problem is, where do you draw the line?
I'd rather argue that for anything that
purports to be news, no editing is ok. -John
\_ As with any profession, ethics are not
black and white; there isn't a line,
there's a fuzzy zone. I'd say cloning
in more smoke is unethical, but
repositioning an object is generally
not, unless the repositioning
fundamentally changes the image
you're shooting. -tom
\_ Ethics are fuzzy? Photo journalism
in a hotly contested war zone should
not require any special effort to get
it ethically right. Don't touch
things, don't photoshop pics, don't
avoid taking certain photos because
they'd make 'your' side look bad.
Point camera, shoot, send photos to
editor to decide which to use. It
takes a lot more effort to screw up
war photos than just to take ethically
clean shots. I've got no problem
cropping extraneous items, shrinking
or enlarging the entire photo to fit
on a page, etc. But any 3rd grader
can figure out that using photoshop
to fundamentally alter a photo is not
ethical.
\_ uh, yes, which is why I said using
photoshop to fundamentally alter
a photo is not ethical. -tom
\- why do some of you keep on about
photoshop? it seems clear to me
cropping can far more
dramatically alter the interp
of a picture than "adding smoke"
might. hey, in fact photo
composition is basically
cropping ... so again there
are the issue between the
photgrapher and whomever
he has a "contract" with ...
whether that is an media org,
a teacher, a contest, a
prvate indiv ... in that case
narrow technical questions,
but for photgraphers who have
an "audience" rather than a
partner, the class of ethical
Qs are different ... and to
talk about these, i think you
need to focus on abstract
issue like "intention" ...
rather than techniques. when
somebody decieives with
statistics, we dont "focus on"
what statisitical techniques
the mislead us with [e.g. small
sample size, vs biased sample,
or rejecting/smoothing outliers]
when we are having a moral
rather technical criticism.
here is an interesting example
of an "cropping matters" ...
a photjournalist took a number
of friendly looking russian boys
in the age 10-15 range. there
were also a couple of pix of
similarly aged nice looking
russian girls ... the natural
reaction was "oh there is the
next generation of kids coming
up in hard time in russia" ...
it turned out the kids were all
at a children's prison and were
murderer and rapists ... and the
girls were accessories to their
boyfriends. now if he had passed
them off as "nice kids" it seems
that would have been kinda leem.
but i can understand cropping
out the sign, so you initial
reaction is "what nice kids"
but when you read the caption,
or go hear the talk, you go
"holy shit ... dont judge a
book by its cover". the reaction
is massively different. there
are lots of other example i can
give you were this "mental
revision" based on what is in/
not in the pix makes a far
stronger impression than a more
"clinical photographic approach".
it's like "irony" is not lying.
even though you may be saying
the opposite of the truth. --psb
\_ Here is what I said above
about cropping, "I've got no
problem cropping extraneous
items, shrinking or enlarging
the entire photo to fit on a
page, etc." So in the case of
your Russian photo, dropping
the sign through cropping is
just as bad as PS'ing it out
as it is an important part of
who the kids are. If they
cropped out some random tree
that would be ok. Again:
cropping extraneous items is
ok, cropping something that
is meaningful is not, and
PS'ing more than to change
the entire photo size for
print or similar mechanical
changes required for technical
reasons is *never* ok for a
journalism photo. Do whatever
you'd like with art, personal
stuff, entertainment or just
about anything else that isn't
expected to be absolutely
true in all senses of true.
And while we're here, no I'm
not ok with moving a teddy
bear in a war zone either.
That's called staging and is
dishonest. This stuff just
isn't that hard to figure out.
\_ It's not called staging,
it's called photography.
-tom
\- i think posing the
teddybear is cheep
because without
disclosure you assume
the photographer
"found it" and it is
definitely harder
to "find" a shot
than to produce one...
it undermines the
notion of "THE DECI-
SIVE MOMENT" [ref:
Henri Cartier Breson,
google for some of
his equisitely timed
shots ... wouldnt you
feel ripped off if
they were staged?]
"i could camp on this
mountain 3 more days
until the moon is
full and the weather
is fine or i can
photoshop it in" ...
i think that's pretty
comparable to moving
the teddy bear or
getting the little
third world kid to
assume the cute pose
via an interpreter and
a bribe ... because
usually this isnt
disclosed and the
implication is it is
spontaneous. [of
course in the case
of a portrait, it is
closer to anything
goes]. however, again
it's hard to draw
bright lines ... if
general macaurthur
waited for the
photgrapher to get
set up before he
waded ashore, is that
"staging" what if
the general did it
of his own volition
instead of being
"directed" etc.
a team i do some
trekking and climbing
with has a lot of
photgraphers and i
think they are almost
all pretty sleazy
about posing things
or crossing lines
[we were thrown out
of a buddhist mon-
estary once], so i'm
kinda cynical about
what a lot of photo-
graphers will do.--psb
graphers will do.
unposed stuff is really
really hard to get
right ... like this
is an ok picture, but
it could have been way
better if it was
posed:
http://home.lbl.gov:8080/~psb/ANNAPURNA_01/DhanerKhete-girl.jpg
it's the stuff HCB
did without posing
[or shooting on
continuous] that makes
him so amazing.
\_ Moving the teddy
bear is a little
cheesy, I'll
agree, but it's
not far from
fairly typical
photographic
setup. What if
he didn't move
the teddy, but
there were a piece
of wood sticking up
blocking a clean
shot in the
direction the
photographer wanted
to frame it, I
think most photogs
would have little
problem moving the
stick. The key
point is that
photography is
all about choosing
a perspective and
trying to make
an emotional
impact; anyone who
says "just point
camera, shoot, and
send photos to the
editor" knows
nothing about
photography. -tom
\- the teddy bear
and mickey mouse
pictures are just
so cloying ... i
just assume they
are staged. the
only question i
have is "did the
photographer
bring it along
like a prop".
as a premed-
itated prop?
i wouldnt be
surprised. maybe
if i get a chance
i'll put up
some pix and
people can try
and guess which
are posed. it's
REALLY interest-
ing to get the
backstory to
some pix [like
the russian
kids one].
\- Note: there is a difference between
news-photo journalism and what you might
call the photo essay or feature ... that's
not so much covering an event but doing more
of an indepth thing. so it isnt at all
intending to be neutral any more than
painters portrait is suppose to tend
to a photograph ... those are artistic
works but can have poltical and editorial
content. american examples include that
DLANGE person or EUGENE SMITH [that guy
was crazy], but also famous studies like
WERNER BISHOF in south american and
GEORGE RODGER "Humanity and Inhumanity".
A somewhat remote aqaiantance is a
professional photog who does both of these
and he was telling me for the feature
works they very carefull pick a printer
[his developer summonned him to paris for
an interview to decide whether he'd do
the printing for the book], so as you might
imagine, the manipulation was well beyond
some marginal tweaks but was a parnership
like a team writing a score and lyrics ...
we dont "blame" mozart for not writing the
words to marriage of figaro.
the point is "altering a photograph"
isnt a sin. if there is a sin, it is
something downstream ... either misleading
the viewer about something outside the
photograph [faking a mass grave ...
probably the worst offense], misleading
the viewer about something about the
photograph [i was there when the rainbow
it the potala palace with the full moon
in back ... when you photshopped in the
moon], or it can simply be cheating in a
contest ... e.g. you are entering a
non-digital contest and you photoshop
in a moon then reprint it to slide or
you change a boring black umbrealla to
a brilliant red one etc. so again, in
the photshopped smoke case, i can understand
why AP or reuters was pissed ... his offense
was "lying" or "cheating". but something
like the "darken OJ on the mag cover to
make him seem evil" is a different
matter and the public does have a bigger
stake in that one ... well except for
the fact that OJ is evil. i think he's
still looking for the racist photoshopper.
\_ Iwo Jima wasn't staged
http://www.paulrother.com/IwoJima/JR50YearsLater.html
\- hmm, fair point. maybe it is better to say: the
actual narrative and the legend have diverged.
[like it being the second flag raising etc] ...
i guess this gets into a discussion about what
staged means. like the picture of macarthur
disembarking ... is there a difference between
his being told which way to walk, or just waiting
for the photographer to get in position or reenacting
it 3-4 times to get the best pix etc. the capa
death of a soldier also has controversy attached
to it. but these are the interesting questions ...
more than was the smoke shape changed or a moon
photoshopped in [again, w.r.t to the editorial
pale, not the aesthetic]. is cropping cheating?
how about dodge-n-burn? ... or those analog techniqies
are ok?
\_ Why is everyone so up in arms about photo fraud? People have
been doing this with pornographically doctored photos of
celebrities and models since the inception of the internet, and
it's not a big deal. -Paris Hilton
\_ How is that celibacy thing going? 1 week and counting ...
\- so are people OUTRAGED by interviews that are rehearsed?
[e.g. where the questions are asked ahead of time, the
person has time to think of the answers, and then then it
is filmed]. BTW, there is a DOCUMETNARY called WAR PHTOGRAPHER
about JAMES NACHTWEY, who i think is the best photojouranlist
in the world now ... a lot of photjournalists also hold in
in awe. i thought i was worth seeing. his pix are
unforgettable. http://http://www.jamesnachtwey.com |
| 5/17 |
|
| www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud -> www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/ The Reuters Photo Scandal A Taxonomy of Fraud A comprehensive overview of the four types of photo fraud committed by Reuters, August, 2006 The recent discovery that the Reuters news agency released a digitally manipulated photograph as an authentic image of the bombing in Beirut has drawn attention to the important topic of bias in the media. But lost in the frenzy over one particular image is an even more devastating fact: that over the last week Reuters has been caught red-handed in an astonishing variety of journalistic frauds in the photo coverage of the war in Lebanon. This page serves as an overview of the various types of hoaxes, lies and other deceptions perpetrated by Reuters in recent days, since the details of the scandal are getting overwhelmed by a torrent of shallow mainstream media coverage that can easily confuse or mislead the viewer. Almost all of the investigative work has been done by cutting-edge blogs, but the proliferation of exposes might overwhelm the casual Web-surfer, who might be getting the various related scandals mixed up. It's important to understand that there is not just a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one kind of fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories. All of these forms of fraud have the same intent: to serve as propaganda for Hezbollah, and to make the Israeli attacks look as brutal as possible. And, taken together, they raise a very serious question: Can any of the coverage by the entrenched media be trusted? The ever-growing scandal now involves other news services as well; at the bottom of this page are numerous examples of bias and fraud by other agencies, including Associated Press, The New York Times, and others. Let's examine each type of fraud, with the photographic evidence itself: 1 Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken. This is what has been getting the majority of coverage in the media, because it is the most clear-cut -- even if the actual significance or newsworthiness of the photos involved is not particularly great. Little Green Footballs, when a reader named "Mike" pointed out the photo to LGF's Charles Johnson, who incontrovertibly demonstrated that the image had been altered using the Photoshop "clone" tool. this case has also been covered extensively throughout the mediasphere. This is an untouched version of the original photo before it was digitally altered. Reuters released it on August 6 when they admitted the doctored photo was indeed fraudulent, and announced they were no longer going to work with Adnan Hajj, the photographer who had Photoshopped the image. No word on what punishment the editors who released the obviously fake photo to the world would receive. Hajj used the Photoshop "clone" tool to copy portions of the smoke-column and repeatedly paste it into the sky, to make the smoke look larger and darker -- though his manipulations really didn't change the effect of the photo to any great degree. His claims that he accidentally added the extra smoke when he was merely trying to remove some dust flecks from the picture are so absurd as to barely even merit comment. The Jawa Report on August 6 The original Reuters caption for this photo was "An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon." As Shackleford pointed out, first of all, those are not missiles depicted in the photo -- they're defensive flares. But more importantly, the photo had been doctored to show three flares, when in fact there had only been one. This image, also shown on the Jawa Report, demonstrates that the clone tool had again been used to copy portions of the photo and paste them in repeatedly elsewhere. In this case, the trails of one flare were copied and lengthened to make it look like there had been three flares. Click on the link above for a detailed explanation and several more photos proving the case. The photo-hoaxster in this instance was again Adnan Hajj, proving beyond doubt that he was very familiar with how to alter images in Photoshop. They made no mention of how or why their editors allowed fake photos to be released as real news, perhaps hoping that the firing of Hajj would put an end to the scandal. But Photoshopping images was only one of several ways in which Reuters has committed journalistic fraud during the war in Lebanon. This is where the Reuters scandal started: with bloggers noticing that some of the images showing the aftermath of the July 30 air raid on Qana looked fishy. There are by now dozens of different photographs from that day whose authenticity has been seriously questioned, so all I can present here is a small representative sample. The first series that raised suspicions was this one, pointed out at many blogs, of a green-helmeted "rescue worker" who seems to parade around with the corpse of a child for an extended period of time. EU Referendum had the most complete photo series compilation, showing that each image individually might be accepted as an unposed authentic news photo, but that when one considers all the photos taken that day by Reuters, AP, and Agence France Presse, it becomes obvious that the entire scene was some kind of gruesome theater performance, apparently with actors posing as rescue workers parading around with a few corpses, seemingly posing for the cameras instead of evacuating the bodies as efficiently as possible. EU Referendum pointed out that if the time stamps on the photos are taken at face value, then the rescue operation becomes even more farcical, with bodies unnecessarily put on display for hours, though the news agencies later claimed that the time stamps do not necessarily reflect the actual time each photo was taken. Lost in the argument over this detail is the fact that the photos were widely doubted even before the time stamp issue, and that even a casual glance at the photo series from Reuters and the other agencies reveals that, in whatever order they were taken, the images seem to reveal at the very least a partly staged scenario, in which unprofessional "rescue workers" seem more concerned with how they and the bodies appear on camera than they do with conducting an actual rescue operation. here, for example), at which he similarly seemed to pose for the camera. Many bloggers speculated that he is in fact a Hezbollah "set designer" and media relations officer whose job it is to milk maximum propaganda value from each photo opportunity, with the cooperation of willing photographers, who must witness his shenanigans in person, but not report on them. was uncovered by Cathy Brooks, a reader of Power Line in a series of photos also taken by Hajj and released by Reuters. As the full series of photos displayed at Power Line shows, what are supposed to be real-time shots of "citizens" running across the Qasmiya Bridge, which had been damaged by Israel, must in fact be something else altogether. For not only are the two men running pointlessly back and forth across the same bridge, but one of them magically becomes a "civil defense worker" in the next caption. In a later photo, the exact same damaged car seems to be quite a distance away, once again on its roof (and notice the other photographer taking a close-up of the car). pointed out in this detailed comment that the photographer may been been alternating between powerful telephoto and wide-angle lenses, which produce only the appearance of the car being moved. If so, then this example belongs more in the "false and misleading captions" section than in this section. The foreshortening is so extreme that it's hard to believe it could be produced simply by different lenses, but it may be possible. The Dog of Flanders blog also believes that the top photo was taken with a telephoto lens, accounting for the apparent movement of the car. Power Line's analysis finishes with a final photograph of a completely different damaged bridge, which is also identified as the Qasmiya Bridge. But Dog of Flanders speculates in the link given above that there may to two bridges near Qasmiy... |
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| www.paulrother.com/IwoJima/JR50YearsLater.html It has consumed the past half-century of Joe Rosenthal's life. He has been labeled and relabeled, adored and abused, forced to live and relive, explain and defend that day atop Mount Suribachi on each and every day that has followed, more than 18,000 and counting. "I don't think it is in me to do much more of this sort of thing," he said during an interview -- his umpteen-thousandth -- about Iwo Jima. "I don't know how to get across to anybody what 50 years of constant repetition means." Rosenthal is 83 now, nearly blind, a pudgy man with a dapper white mustache and a horseshoe of white hair curving around the back of a largely bald head. He lives alone in San Francisco, near Golden Gate Park, in a little apartment largely given over to stacks of correspondence and documentation related to Iwo Jima. In 1945, he was 33, too nearsighted for military service, short and athletic, with a brushy brown mustache and a head full of tight brown curls. As an AP photographer assigned to the Pacific theater of the war, he had already distinguished himself -- and shown a streak of bravado -- in battles at New Guinea, Hollandia, Guam, Peleliu and Angaur. It is the battle that Joe Rosenthal will fight until he dies. One is that it was the costliest battle in Marine Corps history. Its toll of 6,821 Americans dead, 5,931 of them Marines, accounted for nearly one-third of all Marine Corps losses in all of World War II. It served as the symbol for the Seventh War Loan Drive, for which it was plastered on 35 million posters. It was used on a postage stamp and on the cover of countless magazines and newspapers. As a photograph, it derives its power from a simple, dynamic composition, a sense of momentum and the kinetic energy of six men straining toward a common goal, which for one man has slipped just out of grasp. It has everything," marveled Eddie Adams, a former AP photographer who took another picture that helped sum up a war -- one of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a suspect. Of Rosenthal's picture, he added: "It's perfect: The position, the body language. You couldn't set anything up like this -- it's just so perfect." For 50 years now, Rosenthal has battled a perception that he somehow staged the flag-raising picture, or covered up the fact that it was actually not the first flag-raising at Iwo Jima. The man responsible for spreading the story that the picture was staged, the late Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod, long ago admitted he was wrong. In 1991, a New York Times book reviewer, misquoting a murky treatise on the flag-raising called "Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories and the American Hero," went so far as to suggest that the Pulitzer Prize committee consider revoking Rosenthal's 1945 award for photography. And just a year ago, columnist Jack Anderson promised readers "the real story" of the Iwo Jima photo: that Rosenthal had "accompanied a handpicked group of men for a staged flag raising hours after the original event." Rosenthal's story, told again and again with virtually no variation over the years, is this: On Feb. Marines had been battling for the high ground of Suribachi since their initial landing on Iwo Jima, and now, after suffering terrible losses on the beaches below it, they appeared to be taking it. Upon landing, Rosenthal hurried toward Suribachi, lugging along his bulky Speed Graphic camera, the standard for press photographers at the time. Along the way, he came across two Marine photographers, Pfc. Lou Lowery, a photographer for Leatherneck magazine, who said the flag had already been raised on the summit. He added that it was worth the climb anyway for the view. The first flag, he would later learn, was raised at 10:37 am Shortly thereafter, Marine commanders decided, for reasons still clouded in controversy, to replace it with a larger flag. At the top, Rosenthal tried to find the Marines who had raised the first flag, figuring he could get a group picture of them beside it. When no one seemed willing or able to tell him where they were, he turned his attention to a group of Marines preparing the second flag to be raised. Here, with the rest of the story, is Rosenthal writing in Collier's magazine in 1955: "I thought of trying to get a shot of the two flags, one coming down and the other going up, but although this turned out to be a picture Bob Campbell got, I couldn't line it up. Then I decided to get just the one flag going up, and I backed off about 35 feet. "Here the ground sloped down toward the center of the volcanic crater, and I found that the ground line was in my way. I put my Speed Graphic down and quickly piled up some stones and a Jap sandbag to raise me about two feet (I am only 5 feet 5 inches tall) and I picked up the camera and climbed up on the pile. I decided on a lens setting between f-8 and f-11, and set the speed at 1-400th of a second. stepped between me and the men getting ready to raise the flag. When he moved away, Genaust came across in front of me with his movie camera and then took a position about three feet to my right. He certainly had no inkling he had just taken the best photograph of his career. To make sure he had something worth printing, he gathered all the Marines on the summit together for a jubilant shot under the flag that became known as his "gung-ho" picture. It was 1:05 pm Rosenthal hurried back to the command ship, where he wrote captions for all the pictures he had sent that day, and shipped the film off to the military press center in Guam. There it was processed, edited and sent by radio transmission to the mainland. On the caption, Rosenthal had written: "Atop 550-foot Suribachi Yama, the volcano at the southwest tip of Iwo Jima, Marines of the Second Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Division, hoist the Stars and Stripes, signaling the capture of this key position." At the same time, he told an AP correspondent, Hamilton Feron, that he had shot the second of two flag raisings that day. The flag-raising picture was an immediate sensation back in the States. It arrived in time to be on the front pages of Sunday newspapers across the country on Feb. Rosenthal was quickly wired a congratulatory note from AP headquarters in New York. But he had no idea which picture they were congratulating him for. A few days later, back in Guam, someone asked him if he posed thepicture. Assuming this was a reference to the "gung-ho shot," he said,"Sure." Not long after, Sherrod, the Time-Life correspondent, sent a cable to his editors in New York reporting that Rosenthal had staged the flag-raising photo. Time magazine's radio show, "Time Views the News," broadcast a report charging that "Rosenthal climbed Suribachi after the flag had already been planted. Like most photographers (he) could not resist reposing his characters in historic fashion." Time was to retract the story within days and issue an apology to Rosenthal. He accepted it, but was never able to entirely shake the taint Time had cast on his story. A new book, "Shadow of Suribachi: Raising the Flags on Iwo Jima," offers the fullest defense yet of Rosenthal and his picture. In it, Sherrod is quoted as saying he'd been told the erroneous story of the restaging by Lowery, the Marine photographer who captured the first flag raising. "It was Lowery who led me into the error on the Rosenthal photo," Sherrod told the authors, Parker Albee Jr. Rosenthal, who was to become close friends with Lowery in the years after Iwo Jima, rejects this explanation. "I think that is a twist that has been put on by Sherrod," Rosenthal said. He believes the source of the misunderstanding was his response to the question about his picture being posed. Rosenthal is the only party to the dispute who is still alive. His attitude now is mostly one of forgiveness and acceptance. There is still, of course, the issue of whether the second flag-raising was noteworthy enough to have been enshrined as a historical icon. To be sure, it didn't help that the Marine Corps and most of the wartime press conveniently glossed over the fact of the first flag-raising. But whether or not there was a cover-up (Albee and Freeman are persuasive in arguing that the ... |
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| sfgate.com Friday, May 14, 2004 Updated: 12:07 AM PDT ' I'm guessing that the best way to hail a cab or a bartender in Athens will not be by waving an American flag." Sorensen Capital group He's already got more money than god, but that isn't stopping Steve Young (above, right) from embarking on a second career in business. Gov's Balancing Act Schwarzenegger unveils revised budget containing spending cuts and (as promised) no new taxes. Wedding Date's Still On Same-sex marriage opponents lose bid to halt gay nuptials, scheduled to begin Monday in Massachusetts. Researchers say they've found evidence of impact greater than the one that probably caused the dinosaurs' extinction. Wars' $50 Bil Price Tag "It's a big bill," says Wolfowitz, who estimates the cost of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. No Plea From Anderson Using a wheelchair, the haggard-looking suspect is arraigned in the murder of Xiana Fairchild. Giants Left Stranded G-men leave 12 men on base, including two in the bottom of the 9th, and drop series to Philly. Sex, Drugs, And Then 5 Deaths Playboy Playmate tells how she got involved with 2 suspects, but left in just the nick of time. Pixar Growth Plan Wins Fans 20-year proposal for Emeryville site gets flak from activists, but city says go for it. |