TUESDAY'S LETTERS: Readers Respond to Iwo Jima Photo Article

By: E&P Staff In today's letters, more readers respond to a recent E&P article noting that the famous photograph of a U.S. flag being raised on Iwo Jima during the Second World War was questioned periodically for many years, but always found to be not staged.

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On the Iwo Jima Photograph

To use a lame moral equivalency argument in defense of demonstrably staged photos is beneath contempt. [Joe]Rosenthal et al. were not encouraging terrorists, (or "insurgents" as they are known by some value-neutral journos). To compare Rosenthal, this close to his death, to people who have been caught cooking the books, speaks eloquently to the agendas of those who purport to be objective. The country on their passport is obviously far down in perceived affinity. Perlmutter is guilty only of understatement.

Rick Peterson
Duxbury, Mass.



My father was one of the Marines who led [Joe] Rosenthal up Mt. Suribachi.

He witnessed the second flag raising at the top of the mountain. It was not staged. What was staged was Mr. Rosenthal's almost equally famous "Gung Ho" photo of Marines under the flag lined up in rows. My father appears in this photo. Mr. Rosenthal shot it in desperation, believing that he had missed the second flag raising.

To equate Mr. Rosenthal's Iwo Jima photos with those orchestrated by Hezbollah sympathizers is to do a great disservice to a great and honest photo journalist.

David Griffith
Charlotte, N.C.

Prior to the dustup over Rosenthal's Iwo Jima flag-raising picture, the
great Robert Capa stood accused for years of staging the famous "Falling Soldier" photo, taken in 1936 at the height of the Spanish Civil War. And before that, Matthew Brady drew criticism for purportedly arranging corpses in some of his post-battle shots, taken during our own Civil War. The controversy, it seems, is as old as news photography itself.

Mike Hudson
Editor, Niagara Falls Reporter
Niagara Falls, N.Y.