San Francisco: Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died on Sunday. He was 94.
Rosenthal died of natural causes at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco suburb of Novato, his daughter, Anne Rosenthal said.
"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity," Anne Rosenthal said.
His photo, taken for The Associated Press on February 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.
The photo was listed in 1999 at No 68 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
The photo actually shows the second raising of the flag that day on Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island. The first flag had been deemed too small.
"What I see behind the photo is what it took to get up to those heights - the kind of devotion to their country that those young men had, and the sacrifices they made," Rosenthal once said and added, "I take some gratification in being a little part of what the US stands for."
He liked to call himself "a guy who was up in the big leagues for a cup of coffee at one time."
The picture was an inspiration for Thomas E Franklin of The Record of Bergen County, NJ, who took the photo of three firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Franklin said he instantly saw the similarities with the Iwo Jima photo as he looked through his lens. Franklin's photo, distributed worldwide by the AP, was a finalist in 2002 for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography.
The AP photo quickly became the subject of posters, war-bond drives and a US postage stamp.
Rosenthal left the AP later in 1945 to join the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked as a photographer for 35 years before retiring.
"He was short in stature but that was about it. He had a lot of nerve," said John O'Hara, a retired photographer who worked with Rosenthal at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rosenthal's famous picture kept him busy for years, and he continued to get requests for prints decades after the shutter clicked. He said he was always flattered by the tumult surrounding the shot, but added, "I'd rather just lie down and listen to a ball game."
Rosenthal was born in 1911 in Washington, DC.
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