A military historian has won the first round in a battle to recover $175,000 from the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, which lost several photographs from an album it borrowed from the collector, including a Pulitzer-Prize winning image of marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima.

Rodney Hilton Brown, a mortgage broker who collects historical artifacts, lent the album to the museum in 2005 for an exhibition commemorating the 60th anniversary of Iwo Jima’s capture by the United States.