The Power Line blog has a great post Joe. If you don’t know, and I didn’t, Joe Rosenthal took this famous picture (among others).
To bad it’s so easy to believe this comment from a Powerline reader…
As soon as I saw that picture I was reminded of the “posed picture” story that my family and I were told when we were on a guided tour in Washington, D.C. several years ago. When we visited the statue, the DC guide told us that, although the picture was famous, it was only a posed picture. She told us that the flag had already been raised before Rosenthal arrived on the scene, so he made them take it down and raise it up again in order to get the shot. I remember thinking it was such a shame that photographers did that kind of thing in order to elicit certain kinds of emotions from the viewers of the photograph.