The celebrations are under way: the Second World War is truly over. In Times Square, New York, a sailor expresses his joy by passionately kissing a nurse. The (staged) photograph, published in Life magazine, was made by Alfred Eisenstaedt, an exponent of German photojournalism.
Although ‘V-J Day’ is short for Victory over Japan Day, the celebration of Japan's surrender that took place on August 15, 1945, Eisenstaedt's photograph quickly came to symbolize the widespread relief that swept across the United States after the war ended.
Yet more than sixty years later, not everything about the photograph has been explained. Eisenstaedt, who emigrated to the United States in 1935 and is regarded as a founding father of photojournalism, liked to move quickly from one event to another while photographing, so many details about his images were lost. There is also uncertainty about The Kiss, including the precise identities of the two people in the photograph. One widely accepted theory holds that the woman was Edith Shain, although several sources identify her as Greta Friedman. The sailor was identified in August 2005 (!) as George Mendonça of Newport, Rhode Island. Yet even here, men still maintain to this day that the honor belongs to them. A relatively recent article in In Touch magazine sheds a different light on the kissing couple and introduces the names of—indeed—Edith Shain and Carl Muscarello. According to the article, the pair joined other exuberant couples in a Times Square ‘kiss-in’ for peace…
And Eisenstaedt? From the time he became chief photographer at Life in 1936, he photographed more than ninety covers and famous figures from around the world—including Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway and Sophia Loren—and was even reminded of his affectionate magnum opus on his deathbed in 1995.
