For those who remember 14 August 1945, the image “VJ Day in Times Square”, often called “the kiss”, is a time machine, capable of rewinding emotions back to a moment of breathtaking news like a cinematic flashback.
People too young for such memories have their own – maybe the Zapruder film, the napalm girl, the contorted contrails of Challenger or the World Trade Center towers aflame with jet fuel. Unlike those images, though, the kiss is most often seen as a moment of joy.
Last week one of the characters in this story died. Greta Friedman was one of several women who has claimed to be the “nurse” in the kiss photo (she was a dental hygienist). She may have been the real deal, but in a photo this famous the identity of the characters is immaterial – what matters is that universally understood iconic photographs may be dying too.
This story isn’t about the woman being kissed, though she allegedly didn’t know the man who pulled her in for an impromptu smooch. Nor is it about the sailor, perhaps overwhelmed with excitement that with the end of the second world war his chance of being killed in the Pacific just evaporated. The image has become a collective cultural exclamation of relief, of stolen dreams returned to their proper owners.
When we look at this image we borrow emotions from a personal experience of uninhibited joy laced, perhaps, with some inappropriate behavior. To that we attach 71 subsequent years of historical ripples, all that has happened to our world since. That is, it taps into specific and universal feelings at the same time.
As a young photojournalist I once asked myself if I could pore over this and other iconic images to find their recipe. How can I prepare to capture moments like this? How could I match photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s contribution to our cultural memory? I soon learned that – fortunately for images like this one – there is no recipe.
Their power comes from their mirror-like qualities: we see ourselves in their characters’ emotions. Their influence comes from connection to culturally significant moments. But their magic, their timeless spell, comes from spontaneity. To snatch “the kiss” from the uninterrupted flow of time Eisenstaedt moved with the elegance, decisive speed and beauty of Pelé on the football pitch. He followed the sailor’s antics, waiting to complete the dark yin of the sailor’s service dress blues with the white yang of the woman’s uniform.
“Then suddenly in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed,” he wrote. “I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse. If she had been dressed in a dark dress I never would have taken the picture. If the sailor had wore a white uniform, the same.”
This magic may be on the wane. Iconic imagery comes from common experience, and perhaps now, in an age when few of us gather our understanding of the world from the same medium, such photographs may become yet more scarce. How will we memorialize our current era? Will it be through images broadcast by mass media of charred Blackwater security contractors strung from a bridge in Fallujah? Through an image shared through social media of a Syrian child washed up on a Mediterranean shore? Or will these images be too rapidly replaced in our hearts and memories by our customized and unrelenting newsfeeds?
For in photojournalism, icons are not made. They emerge by common agreement from how they symbolize history. They are scarce, and they depend on a cohesive sense of what is happening to us.