Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/19/powerful-iwo-jima-wwii-footage.html
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Man, any time I find myself engaging in self-pity about living in the world of today, I try and remember that I haven’t been drafted and shipped out to a 109 degree island in the middle of the Pacific to shit my guts out while being eaten by bugs, all the while having grenades thrown at me for a couple years.
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I have some serious differences with Clint Eastwood these days but I still think Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima made a clever A Side/B Side pair of companion films for how much it sucked for everyone who was sent to fight on that island.
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Don’t forget Ira Hayes.
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Amazing what SC can accomplish when they temporarily pause their obsession with the Civil War.
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I … that seems like the minimum-est possible effort that could conceivably be done for the cover of a thing devoted to Iwo Jima?
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They didn’t want to leave any doubts about the main issue of the Iwo Jima special edition.
Sure, but the tweet is still odd. “Hey! Everyone! Look at this great work I did!”
Uh … the most obvious and stereotyped photo of the battle was underlaid behind the standard masthead. And that’s the sum total of what the tweeter did. Anyone with Paintshop or Gimp - or even just MS Paint - could have created the same thing from scratch within 10 minutes of getting the task brief.
There’s no editorial content, no listing of major articles, no compositing of the image with other relevant imagery (e.g., the statue in Washington, operational maps, etc), no interesting take on the standard approach. To me, this cover screams “come here for generic recycled pap that adds absolutely nothing to your understanding of the event”, which - given the magazine - is probably highly accurate, but it certainly isn’t enticing.
Edit: on reflection, the strong diagonal created by the flagpole set corner-to-corner on the page is kind of artistic.
well, was her source material color or black and white?
The original original was B&W I believe, but it’s been public domain for a while, and colorised copies have been around for several years at least.
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I thought the original was different. I remember reading long ago that they raised the flag, took a photo, then redid it later. Or maybe they had to restage the flag raising because it wasn’t filmed the first time.
I checked, the details are out there.
I’d also point out that the image is so iconic that it’s been reused in all kinds of situations. Not the photo,but mage of people raising a flag.
My grandfather fought there as a Marine, and this is very much the impression I got from him for how he treated most of life.
Shit like waking up in the morning and finding a dead buddy and a bunch of footprints all around the fox holes.
He wasn’t a bad ass, or anything, either. He just didn’t think life could get any worse than it had for that brief period.
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Respectfully disagree.
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It says History of War, so I was thinking that it would be cool if the ground they were walking on turned out to be a WW1 trench, and that sort of seemed to come from the crimean war, or the napoleonic wars, and so, on and so forth. But that would require a far larger canvas.
I suppose that sort of thing has been done before, but people have recolorized wwii footage before.
Yes, my dad (who was in the marines there) also said they shot and reshot that scene several times, different ways, with different men, too… anecdote, I can’t verify. I wouldn’t be surprised if documentation showing that shows up in the archives.
The fighting in the Pacific theater looked horrific, just based on what I’ve seen in films. I can’t even imagine. I’m glad your grandfather made it home. My grandfather fought in Europe during WWII. Sadly, Nazis killed him outside Elsdorf, Germany. I still have the Western Union telegram that was handed to my grandmother by officials who rang the front doorbell. My dad was only six years old but remembered that she screamed and fainted when she got the news.
Before accusing someone of minimal effort, make some effort yourself. The artist specializes in colorizing historical photos.
https://twitter.com/marinamaral2
“@marinamaral2 - Passionate about history, digital colorist. I restore and colorize black and white photographs”
Amazing DDay work: https://marinamaral.com/dday-75-in-color-june-6-1944/
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