in No Caption Needed, all of which they feel have had “distinctive influence on public opinion,” they also acknowledge that “claims regarding influence are notoriously difficult to prove,” and thus leave the door open for further identification and analysis of iconic imagery (7). Their study of the iconic photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising, which they see as “unquestionably the most popular image of World War II,” exemplifies and fulfills the criteria for visual rhetoric projects (Hariman and Lucaites 21).
Hariman and Lucaites understand the Iwo Jima photo, which depicts six U.S. soldiers raising the American flag at the top of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima, relative to the questions of rhetorical studies when they analyze the photo’s composition, its appropriation over time, and its reproduction within popular media. Similar to Finnegan’s work with the Lincoln photograph, they begin by contextualizing the photo’s original publication on February 25, 1945 on the front page of newspapers nationwide (93). They then go on to describe how the photo’s meaning has shifted over time and across generations (105). In the original photo, they eloquently analyze the significance of the men’s poses and the meaning conveyed through the photo’s visual composition of their coordinated efforts to plant the flag pole in the ground atop Mount Suribachi:
There is a palpable harmony to the bodies as they strain together in the athleticism of physical work. Although the poses shift from being bent close to the ground to bearing a load to lifting upwards, one can draw a horizontal line across their belt lines, their knees all move together as if marching in step, all their physical energy flows along their common line of sight to the single point of impact in the earth. [. . .] We see the sure coordination of bodies with each other and with an instrument dedicated to their task. (Hariman and Lucaites 96)
Through their visual analysis of the image, Hariman and Lucaites are able to attribute its iconic power to “the combination of historical setting, visual transparency, and selfless action” (97). The complexity of the photo’s power, they feel, is rooted in the “three codes of American public culture” conveyed through its composition (97). The anonymous but collective work ethic of the men working together conveys a sense of egalitarianism, while the flag raising conveys a sense of nationalism in its symbolism of “the nation’s sacrifice and victory in World War II” (97). Finally, the “photo as a whole has the aesthetic quality of a sculpture” (97) thus affording it with a sense of civic republicanism; that is, the photo’s monumental or sculpture-like quality affords it with the commemorative function often associated with public monuments and art installations, many of which represent civic virtue or political successes (101). In fact, as Hariman and Lucaites note, Congress later passed a bill subsidizing a memorial based on the photo; the memorial was unveiled in 1954 and resides outside Arlington National Cemetery (94).
The Iwo Jima photo’s “compositional richness” (98) helps account for its subsequent appropriations within society over time. Like an original photograph or visual artifact, reproductions and appropriations of original works rely on social knowledge and reflect shifting contexts, and so the study of appropriations or reproductions that involve “copying, imitating, [or] satirizing” can make important contributions to visual rhetoric projects. Moreover, like the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, appropriations need not take the form of solely textual media or visual photographs—they may involve sculpture, public art installations, or other forms of memorializing. While some reproductions retain the direct meaning of the original, as does the Iwo Jima Memorial, for example, others may stray from the original relationship between image and context, arguably creating a mystification of sorts. One of the more recent indirect appropriations of the Iwo Jima photo, for example, occurred just following the events of September 11, 2001, when reporter Thomas E. Franklin shot the now-iconic photo of the three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero.4
Aptly described by Hariman and Lucaites as a “profoundly visual event,” the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. were immediately followed by a huge, multimodal media response that served as a “direct and comprehensive emotional response to the event,” joining “images of the destruction with depictions of the emotional reactions of ordinary people” (128). These large scale visual representations of responses to the disaster helped portray and constitute the public “as a unified nation whose civic virtue guaranteed triumph over disaster” (Hariman and Lucaites 128). One outcome of these visual narrative representations was that, by the close of the week, as Hariman and Lucaites put it, “a nationwide flag mania was underway” (128).
The public was soon inundated with images of the American flag both in the media and in everyday life; these images came to represent “fear and anger” on the one hand, and instances of patriotism and “civic pride” on the other (128). Soon, a photographic icon emerged from these images: that of the three firefighters raising the U.S. flag at the site of what was just formerly the World Trade Center. The public immediately recognized the image as reminiscent of the Iwo Jima photo. Even Thomas Franklin, the photographer who took the photo, saw the firefighters raising the flag “and thought, ‘Iwo Jima’” (Hill and Helmers 5). As Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers describe, this photo demonstrates an instance of intertextuality, “the recognition and referencing of images from one scene to another” (5). Appropriations, for example, rely on intertextuality for their reception and tap into social knowledge in their ability to construct connections from one context to another. While the photo of the firefighters is now officially referred to as “Ground Zero Spirit,” a version of the image was initially captioned by People magazine as “‘an echo of Iwo Jima’” (Hariman and Lucaites 131). Like the Iwo Jima photo, say Hariman and Lucaites, the firefighters in the photo are “dominated by their anonymity and working class norms of hard physical labor, self-sacrifice, and loyalty” (132). In addition, like the Iwo Jima photo, the flag pole “cuts across the frame on the same diagonal [. . .] while the flag itself is moved upward by coordinated effort” (133). The background is bleak and empty and, like the Iwo Jima photo, the image itself does not depict war in progress, though “precipitating events and surrounding discourse might suggest otherwise” (133). While the context has shifted, the result is again the reflection of the American codes of public culture: “egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism” (Hariman and Lucaites 133). On the one hand, while a pervasive symbol such as the American flag carries with it particular “ideological formations such as nationalism,” it is also open to appropriation and serves not only as a means for perpetuating a particular normative mode but also allows for “inflection and critique” (135). Finnegan describes the way in which viewers bring their own contexts to bear on the interpretation of images. Likewise, one goal of Hariman and Lucaites’s discussion of the Ground Zero photo is to show how iconic photographs, rather than adhering to a “fixed meaning,” function as malleable resources that invite the public to construct connections and “coordinate available structures of identification within a performative space open to continued and varied articulation” (135).
Moreover, these articulations and appropriations need not be purely or traditionally visual in nature, and need not take the form of solely print media or photographs. That is, just as the Iwo Jima Memorial emerged as a direct appropriation of the original photo, following the emergence of the iconic Ground Zero Spirit photo, “there was an immediate call to establish a memorial park at ground zero in Manhattan that would include a statue of the firefighters raising the flag” (Hariman and Lucaites 129). Certainly, the events of September 11 set into effect their own course of memorializing.
In the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, the public witnessed and participated in various acts of memorializing that spanned modes of visual and material representation. Such activities included the creation of makeshift memorial spaces constructed by citizens, media documentaries and reports, and other objects of print and popular media. As L.J. Nicoletti describes, we were “consuming political rhetoric and visual forms of memorialization as never before” (56). To help her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11 and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media, for example, she developed an assignment in which her students designed their own memorials, thus enabling
