Times Square, New York

A photograph the photographer did not stage

Alfred Eisenstaedt of Life magazine had been wandering Times Square on the afternoon of 14 August 1945 photographing the spontaneous celebration that broke out when President Truman announced the Japanese surrender at 19:03 Eastern Time.

Eisenstaedt later recalled he had been following a sailor — George Mendonsa, a 22-year-old quartermaster on shore leave — who was grabbing and kissing every woman within reach.

The sailor caught Greta Zimmer Friedman, a 21-year-old Austrian-born dental assistant, in a back-bending kiss outside the Times Tower at approximately 19:23.

Eisenstaedt snapped four frames in five seconds. The Kodak Tri-X film was developed that evening at the Life darkroom. The third frame ran in Life on 27 August 1945, two weeks later.

Two strangers, identified after fifty years

For decades, the identities of the sailor and the nurse were unknown.

(Friedman was actually a dental assistant in a white nurse-style uniform, not a nurse.)

Eisenstaedt had not asked their names. Life magazine never identified them. Multiple sailors and multiple women claimed to be the figures in the photograph over the next fifty years. The 1980 Life retrospective ran a public appeal, and eleven sailors and three women came forward.

Forensic analysis of facial features, ear-shape, hairline, and the position of a small mole on the sailor's right cheek finally confirmed in 2012 that the sailor was George Mendonsa.

Not a celebratory kiss, exactly

The two were not in a relationship. They had not met before that afternoon.

Friedman, in a 2005 oral history with the Veterans History Project, described the moment as "more an action of victory rather than a romantic kiss". Mendonsa had been drinking and was on a date with a different woman (Rita Petry, his future wife of 70 years) when he saw Friedman in her white uniform — mistaking her for a nurse — and grabbed her in gratitude for the nurses who had treated wounded sailors he knew.

In modern language, the kiss would be characterised as non-consensual. This contextual complication has become part of how the image is now discussed. Friedman in her later interviews consistently said she did not feel attacked or violated, simply startled, and that the photograph itself was not the moment to apply modern frames of consent retrospectively.

Mendonsa at 95, Friedman at 92

George Mendonsa died on 17 February 2019, four days short of his 96th birthday, at his home in Middletown, Rhode Island. Greta Friedman had died on 8 September 2016, age 92, in Richmond, Virginia.

Both had cooperated extensively with historians in their later years. Both attended the unveiling of the Unconditional Surrender sculpture by Seward Johnson — a 7.6-metre painted fibreglass replica of the photograph — when it was first installed in Sarasota, Florida in 2005.

They appeared in photographs together, but never met again in the way they had on 14 August 1945. Their interaction was a single moment, captured in a single photograph, that became one of the defining images of the twentieth century.