"staged"

[Jonathan Lighter]

A lot of people believe that Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of the
flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi was "staged."  In fact, somebody wrote to the
_New Yorker_ recently to make that claim and the editors printed the letter.


Without going in to the details of the non-"staged" Suribachi photo, I
direct your attention to the following:

"As for whether or not the photo was staged, Craig says no way. 'The big
debate about the picture, which everyone always wants to know, is: Was it
staged? No! No, no, no! You don't have 15 men in a picture and take just two
shots. The men were just there . . . . The only thing that happened was that
Ruth Orkin was wise enough to ask me to turn around and go back and repeat'
the walk down the street."

The photo in question is here:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/american-girl-italy-60-years-later-221005987.html

The issue in both cases is the meaning of "staged."  To me, a photo is
staged if conditions are carefully created by the photographer to make a
stunning photograph. That was certainly not the case on Iwo Jima.

As for the photo of the Ninalee Craig: the fact that Ruth Orkin had her
subject walk down the same street in front of the same men a second time,
for the specific purpose of making a photo, comes awfully damned close. It
is not, as is usually assumed, simply a candid shot of an American girl on
an Italian street.

Compared to the Suribachi shot, the street scene was very much staged. Of
course, neither was "posed," which may be what people are confusing "staged"
with.

I raise the point because issues of what's real and what's Memorex are
becoming ever more significant.

JL

JL


--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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