- Photographers

The Tardy Times

OBITS: PHOTOGRAPHERS

'I shared in their joy as well as their
sorrows, silently . . . and vicariously'

                                                                Paul Glines
     Paul Glines
Joe Rosenthal
    Arthur Fritch

    For a separate obituary on Fran Ortiz, see the
    page in the Tardy Times section.

Paul Glines
HE COULDN'T understand why the reporter would wave the baton, so to speak, while the photographer had to play second fiddle. And drive the car. And be called a “cameraman.” Paul Glines wasn't shy. During two decades at the Examiner, the self-taught photographer did what he could to upgrade the status of the men and women who make the one picture that is worth more, much more, than a thousand words.
    “He tried hard to show that photographers had as much to contribute to journalism as writers,” said his onetime boss, Eric Meskauskas.
     A man in a hurry, Glines couldn't wait to get to his next assignment. He would drive so fast that reporter would shut his eyes and pray. In 1988, Glines married Sara Winning, an Examiner editorial assistant and daughter of the late Jack Winning (former editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record and managing editor of the Contra Costa Times). With his young wife, Glines quit the newspaper to become his own boss and owner of a photo studio in Aberdeen, Wash. It failed four years later, victim of the spotted owl and the subsequent decline in logging.
    After a stop in Connecticut for a job in the baseball card business, Paul and Sara settled in Matawan, N.J. He worked on a book – a series of portraits of ordinary people.
    He broke his leg last year. He was driving near his home in New Jersey on March 1, but it wasn't an accident that killed him. It was a heart attack. He was 71.
   He leaves Sara, who is now vice president for interactive media for MediaNews Group's East Coast operations.
   Glines had a three-dimensional outlook for his two-dimensional art.
   “Life from behind a camera allowed for an opportunity to participate in people's lives,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “I shared in their joy as well as their sorrows, silently, up close and somewhat vicariously.”

Joe Rosenthal
HE DIED in his sleep on Aug. 14, 2007, a few weeks before the release of “Flags of Our Fathers.” It didn't matter. At 94, his eyesight was too far gone to let him see the movie, the latest spinoff from the world's most famous photograph.
     The photo changed his life.
     Those weak eyes kept the former San Francisco News reporter/photographer from enlisting in the Army with the outbreak of World War II. He went to war as a civilian photographer documenting the perils of Atlantic convoys, the Nazi rocket bomb attacks on London and, finally, the South Pacific. After the New Guinea campaign he landed as an AP combat photographer in the Philippines, Guam, Peleliu and Anguar. Then he came ashore at little Iwo Jima. The battle would kill all but 1,083 of the 22,000 Japanese defenders. It took the lives of 6,621 American invaders, most of them Marines.
     As the shooting continued on Feb. 23, 1945, the 33-year-old photographer climbed up the crater of 550-foot volcanic hill he called Suribachi-Yama. Five Marines and Navy corpsman took down a smaller flag and hoisted a larger one. Rosenthal stood on a sandbag, set his Speed Graphic at 4/100th and f-8 to f-ll, dodged a movie cameraman and pressed the shutter. The film was shipped to Guam, where the AP darkroom editor cropped the negative, looked at the print and said, “Here's one for all time.” He was right.
    The iconic picture won the Pulitzer Prize for 1945, appeared on dozens of magazine covers, illuminated a $26 billion war bonds drive, brought patriotism to postage stamps, inspired the 100-ton Iwo Jima Memorial statue in Arlington, Va., and figured prominently in a John Wayne movie in 1949, “Sands of Iwo Jima.”
     If Joe was a celebrity, he sure didn't act like one. After the war, he spent 35 years as a journeyman at the Chronicle. A self-effacing man who wore a beret and looked like a bespectacled favorite uncle, the newsman who shot the world's most famous photo went from four-alarm fires to society receptions to the St. Patrick's Day parades. At various times he headed the Press Club, the Newspaper Guild and the Northern California Press Photographers Association, but he tried to deflect attention from himself.
    "I took the picture," he once said. "The Marines took Iwo Jima."
     He retired in 1981. A month after Joe died, the Marine Corps posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Public Service Medal. It took half a century.
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     Note: Mitchell Landsberg of the AP explains how misunderstandings led to erroneous reports that Joe staged the flag-raising photo. See: www.ap.org/pages/about/pulitzer/rosenthal.html

Other photographers
HE RETIRED nearly 25 years ago, but Arthur Frisch was well remembered as oldest of the old-timers at the Chronicle. He started as a copyboy (1935), served in the Navy in World War II and, back when a high school (Balboa) graduate didn't necessarily need a college degree in visual arts, became a photographer. His pictures bedecked the newspaper for nearly 40 years. He retired in 1984 and died Jan. 10 at the age of 89. . . She was only 51 when brain cancer on June 20 took the life of multi-talented Angela Pancrazio, whose career included the Mercury News, the Oregonian and a share of the Pulitzer at the Oakland Tribune for photographs of the 1989 earthquake. She joined the Arizona Republic in 1999. ...Marianne Thomas, the Chronicle's photo editor from 1992 to 2002, died of cancer Sept. 21. She was 57.

Thirty
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