He did it anyway because it was right.

The Symbol He Could Not Escape

Around 1950, a reporter asked Ira Hayes what it felt like to be famous.

Hayes’s response, as it was later reported, was something close to: he didn’t feel famous.

He felt like Ira Hayes, and he just wanted to be left alone.

The photograph would not leave him alone.

Joe Rosenthal’s image had by this point achieved a status that went beyond famous.

It had become something close to sacred in the American visual vocabulary — a representation of collective effort, sacrifice, and triumph that carried a symbolic weight no single image should perhaps be asked to carry.