San Francisco names street after Associated Press Iwo Jima photographer

A block of downtown San Francisco was named Thursday after the photojournalist who captured one of the most enduring images of World War II, U.S. Marines raising the flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Joe Rosenthal, who died in 2006 at age 94, worked for The Associated Press in 1945 when he took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.

After the war, he began working as a staff photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle and for 35 years, until his retirement in 1981, he captured moments of city life, both extraordinary and everyday.

Rosenthal photographed famous people for the newspaper, including a young Willie Mays trying on his hat as a San Francisco Giant in 1957, and everyday people, including children joyfully running to freedom on the last day of school in 1965.

The 600 block of Sutter Street, near Union Square in downtown, became Joe Rosenthal Way after a brief ceremony Thursday morning. The Marines Memorial Club, which is located on the block, welcomed the new street name.

Aaron Peskin, who heads the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, welcomed the city’s political elite, military officials and members of Rosenthal’s family to toast the late photographer, who was born in Washington, D.C., of Russian Jewish immigrant parents.

The famous photo became the centerpiece of a war bond poster that helped raise $26 billion in 1945. Tom Graves, chapter historian of the US Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association ., who promoted the name of the street, said that the image helped win the war.

“But over the years I have also come to appreciate his role as a San Francisco newspaper photographer who, as Supervisor Peskin says, went to work every day to photograph the city we all live in, we all love,” he said.

Graves and others said they look forward to tourists and locals stumbling upon the street sign, seeing Rosenthal’s name perhaps for the first time and then going online to learn about the photographer with the terrible eyesight but one eye. for the composition.

Rosenthal never considered himself a war hero, just a working photographer lucky enough to document the courage of soldiers.

When congratulated on his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, Rosenthal said, “Sure, I took the photo. But the Marines took Iwo Jima.”

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