On February 23, 1945 Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took what went on to become one of the most iconic war photographs of the Second World War, Raising the flag on Iwo Jima. The image, which won Rosenthal the Pulitzer prize that year, shows five Marines and one US Navy Corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, on the island of Iwo Jima.

It turns out that the difference between a Pulitzer prize and no prize is two paces to the right (of Joe), because that is where Marine Cinematographer Bill Genaust was standing, filming the exact same event. Unfortunately for Bill history pretty much forgot him and his film, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer an interesting view point of that historic event – a 3 dimensional viewpoint.

Illustrator and cartoonist Greg Williams picked up on an important issue that appears to have been overlooked for over 60 years. He realised that Bill’s film almost certainly contained a single frame taken at exactly the same moment as Joe’s still photograph, but from a slightly different position. Greg realised that when you combine two such images (as the human brain does with the images from our right and left eyes) you get a 3 dimensional image, which is exactly what he has done.

Over at his blog Greg has a number of different 3D versions of this historic moment which, for the first time, provide the viewer with a real sense of depth and spatial relationships. For more information and, of course, the 3D moment from history, head over to Greg’s blog at http://williamsprojects.wordpress.com/tag/bill-genaust/