A photograph by its very nature is a cheat, because it stops time. Life flows rather than freezes, and we don’t get the luxury of pondering our existence frame by frame.
But if a photo as an abstract idea is unnatural, nothing is more human than the individual picture we choose to save. While the photographer suspends reality to focus on one moment, we as the audience clarify reality and give it meaning by selecting from among all those moments a few photographs that will become immortal.
Perhaps it should not come as such a surprise, then, that one photograph during the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima launched a fresh surge of patriotism, a war bond sellout, decades of sentiment and now a major motion picture. Joe Rosenthal’s shot of five U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag is the impetus for Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers.
The controversial Iwo Jima print is a perfect example of how the inherent cheat of the frozen image is overwhelmed by history and the way humans shape their perception of it, whether globally or personally. “Flags of Our Fathers” argues the photo was staged, and gave credit to the wrong men. But America chose it anyway as their favorite icon of World War II, because it said everything we wanted to believe about the nation. It said our best and brightest would sacrifice for a worthy cause, without even asking to show their faces.
How other war photographs have risen to the surface is a more complex puzzle, because few wars in the past century brought with them the clarity of World War II. Sometimes the public chooses the image, by asking for reprints or stapling photocopies to impromptu memorials. Politicized groups take their turn, crafting messages around the image and hoping the combination will persuade. Other photos must wait patiently for anthologies and anointment by a more neutral historian.
The most famous image of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is the prisoner at Abu Ghraib, hooded, humiliated and posed atop a box attached to electrical torture wires. Accounts of prisoner torture by U.S. soldiers prompted more Americans to ask why we were in Iraq and whether there was a plan for the campaign.
Other memorable shots from Iraq also speak words like “occupation” rather than “victory.” One shows a small Iraqi boy taking cover next to a fully armored U.S. soldier, no clear enemy in sight. Another shows crazed Iraqis celebrating the mob killings of U.S. soldiers, their charred, abused bodies hanging from a bridge in the background.
Those images may not remain definitive, though. If current administration policy succeeds, the photo of welcoming Iraqis toppling a statue of Saddam Hussein may return to the fore. Or photos as yet untaken, of a rebuilt Baghdad or a removal of concrete barricades from government buildings.
So far, the most reprinted images from Iraq bear more resemblance to those we save from Vietnam. The two iconic frames from Vietnam scream a chaos few Americans could stomach: The police chief of South Vietnam summarily executing a Viet Cong suspect in a form of street justice our assistance was meant to prevent; and a naked girl, burned by a napalm attack ordered by U.S. forces and carried out by our South Vietnamese allies.
Our first war against Iraq yielded a mixture of lasting pictures. The most poignant was an intimate shot of an Army tank crewman crying in agony, after just learning that the body bag next to him carries a close friend. Only 147 U.S. personnel died in expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and that photo reminded Americans the conflict was not merely the long-distance battle of “precision” smart bombs lauded by military commanders on cable TV.
Another photo from the 1991 Gulf War reflects the overwhelming might of the U.S. military: A seemingly endless line of burned-out Iraqi vehicles pummeled at will by U.S. forces along the “highway of death” back to Baghdad.
And what of Iwo Jima’s significance to World War II? The conflict raged for years over four continents, killing millions. Surely six people erecting a makeshift flagpole on a burned-out volcano does not tell the story of an entire war.
World War II is often represented in U.S. history by the smoking hulk of the U.S.S. Arizona after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Or a mushroom cloud unfolding ominously over Hiroshima, signaling a new age of warfare. Or a sailor kissing a nurse during a New York victory parade. Sense the indelible force of those images – even when not included here on the page, we can conjure them in our heads with just a few words of description.
The irony of making a movie about the Iwo Jima flag raising is that a feature film makes the still photograph only that much more powerful. “Flags of Our Fathers” is a good film about a great picture. A few million people may see the movie, adding a pittance to the hundreds of millions who have pored over the photograph since 1945.
The flags of our fathers endure. And the photos of our fathers endure. In a nation as fragmented, diverse and preoccupied as the United States, the immortal war pictures that serve as collective memory can be counted on just a few fingers.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
