Joe Rosenthal was born on October 9, 1911, in Washington D.C. and took up photography as a hobby during the Great Depression. After a spell as an office boy, he went to San Francisco to work as a reporter-photographer at the San Francisco News.
 
In 1945, during the Second World War, Rosenthal was working as a photographer for the Associated Press in the Pacific Theater. On February 23, 1945, he captured the image that would become his most famous work, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, a photograph of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. The image quickly became a symbol of American patriotism and military sacrifice.
 
Rosenthal's iconic photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1945, and was later used as the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
 
Rosenthal continued to work as a photographer, covering events such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He died on August 20, 2006, at the age of 94. In 2019, an album of his photographs taken on Iwo Jima sold at auction for $47,500.