The power of photojournalism Stephen Woody Publisher’s Notebook The passing of Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who captured history’s most reproduced image, that of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima in WWII (see editorial, photo, above), reinforces once again the power of photojournalism. Particularly, the single photograph. This memorable photojournalism was also caught on video (film from movie cameras), but the video does not have the searing impact as a single-shot photo. To wit: Standing next to Rosenthal when he captured the six servicemen raising a U.S. flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi a second time on Feb. 23, 1945, was Marine Sgt. Bill Genaust. He filmed the action and a frame of the movie is nearly identical to the Rosenthal photo. Genaust was killed shortly thereafter in action. Many have seen the video of the flag-raising, but Rosenthal’s photo is what the memory recalls most often. Ditto the photographs of Eddie Adams, Nick Ut and Bob Taylor. Adams took a memorable photo in 1968 of the Saigon chief of police executing a Viet Cong prisoner, with a pistol shot to the head. There’s video of the shooting, but it’s the photo of Adams we remember. Nick Ut, a friend of Rosenthal’s, said Rosenthal’s image is “the picture no one ever forgets.” Ut’s 1972 image of a little girl, naked and screaming as she flees a napalm attack during the Vietnam War, was also shot as video, but the photo sparked anti-war sentiment. Taylor was the Dallas Times Herald photographer who caught Lee Harvey Oswald being shot to death by Jack Ruby, two days after the Kennedy Assassination. A law enforcement officer, handcuffed to Oswald, recoils in horror as Oswald takes the bullet. Many TV cameras were there, and caught the action, but Taylor’s single image is what nails the moment.I’ve always had a core commitment to good photojournalism, and how it gives a newspaper, large or small, a telling sensation to readers unlike text. We are doing both - single images via digital photography and photo essays; and streaming video on our Web site, www.montrosepress.com. We’ve recently published a couple of terribly sad, even tragic, examples: A photo from a local drug bust where a baby is helpless, her eyes haunting the reader/viewer, while the adult next to her is handcuffed on the curb. Another is from earlier this week. Chris Sitton, a 2003 Montrose High School graduate, died honorably as a U.S. Army medic in Afghanistan. His uniform portrait, which we ran on page one, is a handsome shot of a young man, happily serving his country. But the shot that really got me was the photo on page two, where he’s in an MHS track uniform, his arm around about his track team pals. They are beaming. In his senior year, he and his relay teammates qualified for the state meet; a memory of an innocent time. That candid photo illustrates what a loss it is.If you’d like to know more about the Rosenthal photo, the circumstances surrounding it and the men pictured therein, there’s an excellent book about the subject, ‘Flags of Our Fathers.’ It was written by James Bradley, the son of John Bradley, one of the servicemen in the photo. It was co-written with Ron Powers and published in 2000. The elder Bradley returned to his hometown in Wisconsin after the war, became a successful businessman, a community volunteer and leader, and never spoke of his heroism, or of the famous photo of which he was a participant until his son discovered a cache of wartime memorabilia tucked away from sight. Clint Eastwood is making a film about the book by the same name. It opens Oct. 20. |