Watching the World Change, page 41
The company president, Jon Markey, joined them.
“Once you looked, it sort of took hold,” recalls Markey. “Particularly in the circumstances, I thought, This is historic. It was transcendent. From a human perspective, this was the one—in a collection of thousands—that was stunning, emotionally.”
Richards broke the hush. “That’s not a picture,” Pedota remembers her saying. “It’s a fucking icon.”
Gigli thought, “My God, that’s the classic shot…I’ve been waiting for. It hit a nerve.” Knowing he was “right up against the deadline,” he says, “nine o’clock sharp for the color front and back page,” he took an H-P copy print and ran it out to Bob Townsend, the front-page designer. We couldn’t change the front page, so we put it across the top of the back page, swap[ping] it for a vertical shot already in position in the layout. A couple of editors didn’t want to change it. I insisted on it.”
The Record’s presses started rolling at 11:30 p.m. Gigli, a veteran journalist who knew how to protect an exclusive, watched the clock, waiting for midnight. He needed to make sure that Franklin’s image, at least in the New York area, would run in The Record—and The Record alone. “I deliberately didn’t move it to [the] AP [wire],” he says, “until about ten after twelve”—once the deadlines of the local broadsheets and tabloids had passed.
Once it went across the wire, newspapers felt the tremors. Journalists working the night shifts throughout the Western United States quickly remade their next day’s front page. Their Web sites posted it too. “By the morning of the twelfth,” Franklin remembers, the phones at The Record were “ringing off the hook. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of calls an hour. By the end of the week, they hired [freelancers] just to answer the phones.”
“We were fielding calls from Chicago, Providence, Seattle, Texas,” says Richards. “The calls weren’t [only] for reprints, but for appreciation. ‘My daughter’s bringing it to school’…‘I just want to tell you guys how moved we were.’ We never get that. In this business, usually we get hate mail.”
In the first few weeks after the attacks, inquiries to reprint, license, or market the image came in “from Japan to Switzerland to Omaha,” says Jennifer Borg, general counsel for The Record’s parent company, the North Jersey Media Group. “We received tens of thousands of e-mail requests. I had to hire temporary people to look at my e-mail box. The marketing department, the editors, the reporters—we couldn’t get the paper out if we read all of these.”
While Borg understood that the picture had the potential to raise millions for charity, many of those seeking permission didn’t seem sensitive to the subject matter. “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” she says. “We didn’t want it on a T-shirt. We thought, My God, three thousand people died. [But] a lot of [the] public said, ‘You don’t own it. The picture belongs to everyone. Why aren’t you letting us use it?’”
The NFL wanted to print the image on tickets for January’s Super Bowl. The rock group *NSYNC requested it for a concert backdrop, donating $25,000 to charity, unsolicited. On the other extreme were companies asking to place the scene on snowboards or to re-create it, in miniature, inside snow globes.
Mixed in were urgent, private pleas. Firefighters’ families hoped to put the photo on mass cards at funerals and memorial services. Heartbreaking requests would come from those whose loved ones were missing, or who wanted their own personal copies. Borg remembers one widow who told her, “This is the only thing that’s helping me get out of bed.”
Over time, Franklin began compiling a slide show of various renderings and misappropriations of his picture. Opportunists had incorporated the image into candy wrappers, cigar box lids, jack-o’-lantern carvings, Christmas ornaments, light-switch cover plates, office chair seat cushions. The shot, swiftly slapped on canvas, was sold on eBay as “911 Rescue Firefighter Painting Print #2”—opening bid: $14.99. The image was plastered on the side of a Quonset hut at a Louisiana prison, a car dealership in Washington, a barn in upstate New York.
“The picture has this life of its own,” explains Franklin. “At various points, I’ve felt tremendous pride—or disgust—when others have [used] my picture in different applications. I’m covering the 2001 World Series. Phoenix, Arizona. Game One. I’m in the first base photographers’ box, singing the national anthem. And I look out on the field and see these three [local] firemen and a flag on a pole.” To Franklin, the men seemed confoundingly out of time, like a group of Civil War reenactors. Even the pole had been set on an incline to replicate the one in the shot. “The national anthem ends,” Franklin remembers, his eyes rolling. “They raise this flag. And New York Post photographer Charlie Wenzelberg goes, ‘Tom, they should’ve had you go out and photograph the reenactment’—as part of the reenactment.
“You see something you’ve created—bigger than life,” Franklin reflects. “In an odd way there’s some flattery in that. It surprises me [that] a war and a half have transpired, but this is still happening. Soldiers in Afghanistan were using my picture as a morale thing. They were leaving [copies of] it as a ‘calling card’ after they went on raids.” Crews were also said to have painted replicas of the photo onto the sides of bombs.
The use of the photo as a tool of battlefield propaganda helped it serve as a visual rebuke. Hurling the picture back at the Taliban and al-Qaeda implied: Take this, along with America’s firepower. What’s more, the image of men in uniform, hoisting a flag, would bridge the conceptual gap between the bravest and the brave GI. To many of those looking for potent symbols—as grist in the argument for expanding the fight against terror, to Iraq and elsewhere—the photo provided a pictorial validation that firefighter and terror fighter were kindred combatants in a single, seamless war.
In the main, though, the picture was used more for inspirational than for political ends. “If you scour the visual record,” Richards contends, “there were so many different iconic images that came out of [this] defining moment of our generation. David Handschuh’s picture of the [tumbling tower], looking straight up. That’s tattooed in my brain. The AP shot of the people that looked like they were dipped in chalk. Father [Mychal] Judge being carried out. But Tom’s image was the only one that gave people a sense of resurrection. After seeing the same loop on TV over and over, of the planes going in, Tom’s tugs at your heartstrings in a positive way. Tom’s picture said: Despite this horrible event, we’re going to come out all right. I slept a little better that night after seeing it.”
Even so, a backlash toward the image arose within the photo community. Franklin’s shot, in many photojournalistic circles, was dismissed as flat, trite, and unimaginatively composed. While the picture aptly conveyed steadfastness and resilience, to photo purists it bore few of the hallmarks of Joe Rosenthal’s classic scene at the summit of Mount Suribachi. Rosenthal’s picture had nuance, stature, exquisite symmetry, and an almost propulsive force. The six men raising the flag were knotted together as one unit. Their dramatic gesture was compounded by the tension in their figures: the ground resisted their effort; their flag was wielded as one might thrust a bayonet. The rubble at their feet—actually the rocky surface of a volcanic crater—resembled a pile of bones.
In contrast, cynics considered Franklin’s shot the made-for-TV version. Had Franklin not been there to fashion it, Madison or Pennsylvania Avenues might have dreamed up the “feel good” tableau out of whole cloth. And naysayers pointed out that other photographers had been shooting the same moment—from arguably better angles; Franklin’s paper had merely been fortunate enough to get his shot up on the wire much faster. Indeed, the following spring, just weeks before the Pulitzer Prizes were to be awarded, one picture editor from a large daily confided to me: “We don’t care what wins. As long as it’s not the damn flag.” (Franklin’s shot did not win; instead, The New York Times swept, for its extensive breaking-news and feature coverage—from 9/11 and on through the war in Afghanistan—by its team of seventeen photographers.)
Much of the contempt, of course, was born of envy. Franklin’s picture had become the instant insignia—precisely because it lacked poetry and nuance. The photograph had an almost irreducible simplicity, power, and balance—prerequisites for classic iconography. The three equidistant figures stand in piercing sunlight, which separates them from their surroundings, as if in bas-relief. They appear illuminated, statuesque, aggrandized. The flag, the ultimate symbol of the nation, centers the photograph. The towering rubble is a crushing presence, consuming every inch of the background. Just as Franklin’s camera is angled up toward the firemen, the firemen squint up toward the flag and, by implication, the heavens. And high above them, some have noticed, broken beams form the shape of a cross.
Franklin’s photograph, in short, was no less than the digital-age descendant of Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima, 1945; of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in 1969, having just planted the star-spangled banner on the rocky lunar surface; of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (in which three figures stand as a boat comes ashore on Christmas 1776: General Washington and two compatriots, brandishing an angled flag). Even if the Flag Photo seemed artistically deficient, the public ignored that, embracing it and reproducing it more than any other taken that day.
James Bradley, coauthor with Ron Powers of the definitive history of the Iwo Jima photo, Flags of Our Fathers, has pointed out the similarities between Franklin’s and Rosenthal’s shots: “Both sets of flag-raisers not aware of a nearby photographer, both shots offering hope…both flags from ships.” (The 1945 flag was borrowed from the USS Missoula and hauled up the slopes of Suribachi to inspire the soldiers below.)
But Franklin’s picture, it turns out, has more parallels with Rosenthal’s than might immediately meet the eye. Both were taken on an out-cropping above a killing field. (Seven thousand Americans perished over thirty-six days in the battle for Iwo Jima.) Both were taken in a conflict with unseen enemies. (The Japanese had assumed positions in a warren of island tunnels, pillboxes, and blockhouses; their airborne comrades were best known for their suicide-bombing runs.) Both incidents were also covered by others, whose efforts have largely escaped the public memory. (Rosenthal, Speed Graphic in hand, was accompanied by a private with a still camera and a sergeant who had a movie camera equipped with color film.) Both were destined for America’s front pages, immediately recognized by picture editors as conveying an elevated human response at a low point in a bloody conflict. (Upon first seeing the Iwo Jima picture, AP’s Guam photo chief, John Bodkin, picked up the glossy, whistled, and then shouted across the news bureau: “Here’s one for all time!”) Both became freshly minted American icons that helped buck up a wartime populace.
Both images would later be blemished by rumors of their having been staged, though neither was set up in any way. Indeed, Rosenthal almost missed the moment (the flag raising took all of four seconds), just managing to snag it in one shot, on sheet film. (He was actually photographing a second flag that had been carried to the summit, intended to replace a smaller one that had been hoisted earlier that morning by a different contingent of soldiers.)
One shot showed six men, the other showed three. One had men in fatigues, the other in firefighter’s garb. One was taken at the end of a protracted conflict, the other on its very first day. But in both pictures, exposed fifty-six years apart, anonymous men in helmets, grasping at a flag, took it upon themselves to use their nation’s most beloved symbol to turn a decimated landscape from a battleground into sacred ground in one fleeting, eloquent gesture.
It all began so sensibly and congenially—before the partnership and the esprit de corps frayed, unraveled, dissipated. To this day, it is hard to put one’s finger on it. And even though the picture’s mission continues, irreconcilable differences in how to display the image, and how to profit from it, have polarized those who control the photo and those inside the frame.
That first week, thousands clamored for permission to use the picture: schoolteachers and business leaders, fire chiefs and news directors. Someone had to take charge and stem the tide. And into the fray stepped Jennifer Borg. Tack-sharp and stunning, Borg was a young attorney with printer’s ink in her veins; her great-grandfather, in 1930, had purchased outright what would become The Record of Bergen County, N.J. It was Borg, the company’s in-house counsel, who would come up with a Solomonic solution.
Within thirty-six hours of the attacks, The Record’s marketing department had wisely thought to seek advice from colleagues at The Daily Oklahoman, recalling the horrors of that city’s terrorist bombing in 1995. As Borg remembers, they asked: “We’re a newspaper whose neighbors have just suffered a terrorist act. What do you wish, in hindsight, that you had done differently? Oklahoma advised us that we really needed to be there for the long term.” So The Record’s owners, intent on assisting local residents for years to come, set up the North Jersey Media Group Disaster Relief Fund the day after the attacks.
Next, Borg enlisted the actual subjects of the photo. “Ethically,” she says, “we felt we should get the firefighters’ consent before we went ahead and responded yea or nay to the multitude of requests.” (The Record believed it was required by law to secure their permission for any commercial or publicity use of their likenesses.) So she suggested a meeting, hoping they would want to be a part of the process. “When you start with: What’s the right thing to do?,” she says, “it all falls into place.”
Borg met the firemen over beers at Blondies, a West Side bar, two months after 9/11. “It was very bittersweet,” she recalls. “The atmosphere was like going to a wake—as if you have something in common and you wish it wasn’t this that brought you together. The last thing we were going to talk about was the photo. The photo was the untouchable.” When she walked in, the three firemen were already assembled—reserved, weary, and grateful, she recalls.
Dan McWilliams, the one who had lifted the flag from the boat, is the son of a firefighter. According to intimates, he is the cryptic, quiet one who uses neither e-mail nor cell phone. “Dan’s a doer,” says his attorney, Bill Kelly. An FDNY lieutenant, McWilliams has an almost military bearing, says an acquaintance, calling him “tough, true grit, hard as nails. If I was in a burning building I’d want [him] running in to save me.” Says a third associate, “He’s sensitive. A lot of the toughest guys you meet are tough because they’re sensitive. [He’s also] an extremely principled guy—easily frustrated [by bureaucracy].”
George Johnson, from Queens, recently made captain. Like McWilliams, he comes from a firefighting family and is a rugby “sevens” player, who suits up for the FDNY team and the Rockaway Fisheads Rugby Club. (His nickname: “Rocket.”) Johnson, says a colleague, “is an outdoors guy. He’s a surfer. He comes across as a go-with-the-flow guy, but he deeply cares. He’s secretively passionate about people, the world, the world outside the firehouse.” Five years before 9/11, says Kelly, “George gave bone marrow and saved a kid’s life in Kentucky because his marrow proved to be a one-in-sixty-million match.”
Bill Eisengrein, the figure to the right in the picture, knew McWilliams as just another neighborhood kid on Staten Island. The two men, says a friend, “are polar opposites”; Eisengrein “is much more trusting, open, gregarious.” A member of a Staten Island motorcycle club, Islanders M.C., his passion is his Harley. His forearm bears tattoos of the towers, the flag, a Harley Davidson. (Eisengrein dates an NYPD detective, Kathleen Malone; McWilliams and Johnson are married. All three were in their mid-thirties when the photo was taken.)
Jennifer Borg remembers her first encounter with the three men as “poignant, almost overwhelming. They probably went to five funerals a day. [They seemed] overworked, exhausted. They were a little bit embarrassed that the attention was on them and not on all the people who died or got maimed and hurt. All I could think of was: the temperament that prompted them to raise the flag is the same one that allowed them to go out of their way to meet me because they saw something good that could be done. There was just something noble about them.”
And so the partnership began. The firefighters decided to set up their own fund, in tandem with The Record’s; all income from the licensing of the image would be split fifty-fifty between the two charities. Bill Kelly, a savvy, telegenic attorney with expertise in litigation, intellectual property, and personal injury cases, was chosen to represent the interests of both parties. (Johnson is now married to Kelly’s sister.)
More than half a million dollars from the newspaper’s fund—including profits from the editorial syndication of the picture—would go to New Jersey families affected by the tragedy. Grants from the fire-fighters’ charity, the Bravest Fund (to date, they have dispensed around $300,000), would go to those who had fallen through the bureaucratic cracks: the group of retired firemen who set up a van service to shuttle injured colleagues to hospital visits; the fireman whose daughter’s bacterial meningitis had resulted in a series of amputations, and who needed to adapt his home to accommodate her wheelchair and automatic chairlift.
“It was a beautiful thing,” Franklin asserts. “The Record has chosen not to profit from the picture. [Nor have] the three firemen.” (Franklin, since it is his photo, has earned what he calls “a very, very modest amount.”)
One day Borg lugged four cartons, crammed with inquiries, from the trunk of her Volvo station wagon, and handed them over to Kelly. In time, he would field about sixty thousand entreaties—people wanting to use the picture on everything from bomber jackets to credit cards to mouse pads. One gun maker hoped to fashion the image into a rifle stock. (Request denied.)
At first, everything went smoothly. Both the paper and the firemen signed off on all major requests. “We prioritized,” Borg recalls. “Bill and I realized we had no problem if a woman in Oklahoma wanted to put it on T-shirts to raise proceeds for her firehouse. But we did have a problem with a major company using it exclusively for their commercial gain.” Moreover, The Record, mindful of the sensitivity of the subject and its own journalistic reputation, wanted to protect the integrity of the photo from tacky or demeaning exploitation. (Fire truck decals were in; beer can and wine labels were out.) The bulk of Kelly’s time was taken up with hunting down unauthorized infringements—like the topless bar in upstate New York that plastered the image on a billboard. “We pulled in about two million dollars in settlements,” Kelly recalls.
