HOLLYWOOD - The six models who posed for the late Joe Rosenthal's famous picture of supposed soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima paid tribute to the award winning photographer today, two days after his death at age 94. The picture, taken in Rosenthal's Hollywood studio and passed off to the Associated Press as photojournalism, forever cemented the wedding photographer's reputation as a partriot. Rosenthal waited until the Marine Corp used the picture as the model for its memorial in 1954 before he confessed that he had never even been on Iwo Jima, in fact he's never left the continental United States.The six models who posed happened to be at Rosenthal's studio one day in January 1945 to do a sock photoshoot for Macys when Rosenthal got the idea. "It started out as a gag," Rosenthal told this news source in July 2005. "But then we saw the reaction from the public, and we felt kind 0f guilty about it, so we kept our mouth shut for a long time."
The picture wasn't even Rosenthal's favorite. "No, that distinction belongs to the one where the new Mrs. Irving Mendelbaum got a hunk of cake shoved in her kisser at her wedding reception," Rosenthal said. "Now that's photojournalism."
