Capturing the moment

Monday was the anniversary of the raising of the US flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945. Planting the flag there signaled attacking Marines that a key goal had been achieved in a battle that eventually resulted in the deaths of 20,000 Japanese and nearly 7,000 Americans.

If you have never seen the photograph taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, well, I totally do not understand that. It is one of the most iconic pictures ever taken, and it formed the basis for the Marine Corp Memorial statue at Arlington National Cemetery.

I can think of only two photos taken in the 70-plus years since, which even touch on the power of the flag-raising. Both of those are from Vietnam: Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head on a Saigon street in 1968 (AP’s Eddie Adams), and nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked after being burned by napalm (AP’s Nick Ut).

But what I’m really here to talk about today is the power of the still photograph. We forget about that because we’re so wrapped up in videos—images flashing by so we never have to dwell on something visually, much less really think about it. Like sharks, our eyes are always in motion. And we’ve been led to believe that video is somehow truer than the single image. More lifelike. Or deathlike, in the case of ISIS footage.

Well, I dunno about that. And the flag over Suribachi is a case in point.

There actually is motion picture footage of that flag raising, which, as it happens, was the second flag raised that day. (But it wasn’t staged for the camera, as some have claimed. The first flag wasn’t very big, and so wasn’t visible to Marines who still had a hard fight to go before the island was secured. So it was taken down and replaced with a larger one.)

And that film has nothing like the power of Rosenthal’s perfect frozen moment, capturing the Marines (and one Navy corpsman) as the flag was only just beginning to flow in the wind.

Yes, there are times when having both film and sound is the best way to tell a story. But if you’re a true photographer, and you have your share of lucky moments of being in exactly the right place in the Big Moment, a single shot is worth more than a thousand words, and more than a lot of videos that get spread around the Internet.