Navy veteran who claimed to be the man in the 1945 photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square amid World War II victory celebrations has died

Alfred Eisenstaedt: V.J. Day in Times Square, New York, August 14, 1945

©Time Inc.

"In Times Square on V.J. Day I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight. Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn't make a difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder but none of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse. If she had been dressed in a dark dress I would never have taken the picture. If the sailor had worn a white uniform, the same. I took exactly four pictures. It was done within a few seconds.Only one is right, on account of the balance. In the others the emphasis is wrong — the sailor on the left side is either too small or too tall. People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture." --Alfred Eisensdtaedt, Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt, Abbeville Press

 

©Time Inc.

Glen McDuffie is one of several people who have claimed to be the man in the Alfred Eisenstaedt photo originally published in LIFE Magazine.

"While many people claimed to be the participants in the iconic photograph, McDuffie's assertion was backed up by Lois Gibson, a forensic artist with the Houston Police Department." (Via Gothamist:  Famous V-J Day Times Square Kiss Sailor Dies At 86)

Many others have also publicly claimed to be the participants in the photograph, as in this 2012 article, with one even going so far as to  file a lawsuit against Time Inc. alleging that both Time and Life had violated his right of publicity by using the photograph without his permission. He eventually dropped the lawsuit.

In October 1980, Life published a special spread entitled “Who Is the Kissing Sailor?” Ten sailors wrote to the magazine, each one insisting with convincing evidence — a distinctive hairline, a signature vein on the right hand, a newly acquired Quartermaster 1st Class patch — that he was the “kissing sailor”. Three women also wrote in and claimed to be the nurse.

At exhibitions of his photographs towards then of his life, Alfred Eisenstaedt would frequently encounter people claiming to be the sailor or the nurse. Always gracious, Eisie would simply shake their hands and say "How nice". He was working alone that day in Times Square, without a reporter, and never paused to get anyones name.



The New York Times: Man Known as Kissing Sailor in WWII-Era Image Dies

Vanity Fair: The Elvis Kiss Mystery—Solved!

 

Photograph © Alfred Wertheimer, all rights reserved

By Alanna Nash

WEB EXCLUSIVE August 8, 20
Culture

The Elvis Kiss Mystery—Solved!

In the summer of 1956, a 21-year-old Elvis Presley, already inciting libidinous mayhem from Kansas City to Jacksonville, impishly touched tongues with a young woman in Richmond, Virginia. Photographer Alfred Wertheimer snapped the shutter just at the moment of contact. The result: “The Kiss,” one of the most storied photos in Elvis lore and “the sexiest picture ever taken in the whole world,” according to Diane Keaton, who owns a print. Yet for five decades, no one, not even Wertheimer, knew the identity of Presley’s date—until now.

Read the full article on VF.com here.

A NEW ICONIC "KISS" PHOTO?

The kiss ... Vancouver riot police surround an embracing couple. Photograph: Rich Lam/Getty Images


An Interesting article from the Guardian Newspaper:

Vancouver's kiss of life

The last thing we expected was an authentically romantic picture to emerge from this rioting city of glass

Douglas Haddow
Guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 June 2011 18.10 BST

Vancouver, "the world's most livable city", has been devastated. Not so much by the riotous violence that came soon after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup, but by what the international media's coverage of the carnage may mean for the city's image.

City hall, the province of British Columbia, and indeed the federal government of Canada, are worried that potential tourists will no longer think of Vancouver as a city of yoga pants, sushi and skiing, but of mayhem and fire.

Despite all the sorrow and disgust expressed by Vancouverites over the PR fallout, one image, absent of violence or destruction, has come to define the riot.

We see a young couple laid out on the street, embraced in a kiss, juxtaposed between a blurry riot cop running towards the camera and a line of police charging a crowd in the background.

Once the photograph hit the internet, it became a viral phenomenon in minutes. Already the uncontested frontrunner for the photo of the year, it's being compared to other historical kisses like Robert Doisneau's 'The Kiss' and Alfred Eisenstadt's picture of a kissing couple in Times Square on VJ day.

At first glance, the photo seemed too good to be documentary fact. For many internet flâneurs, myself included, it was too romantic and poignant to be of this world. The breathless idealism of the lover's embrace was in such stark contrast to the mindless rampage occurring around them that the internet's cynical instincts kicked in.

How could such authenticity exist in Vancouver, a city of glass that has spent the last 20 years standing in as a discount soundstage for New York and Los Angeles. You'll find no romance in these streets, unless it's a bit of marketing-related artifice.

Shortly before going to bed in the very wee hours on Thursday morning, my suspicions seemed to be confirmed when I came across an alternate angle of the couple's moment, shot on a camera phone from above, that surely proved the kiss was either contrived or worse.

I immediately posted it on my Tumblr blog and woke up eight hours later to discover that I had unwittingly broken the story that the photograph was indeed not what it seemed. Thousands debated, some kept the faith, others declared that they didn't care if was real or not, and a few claimed they had lost all faith in humanity. A mystery was born. Was it real or not?

Over the following hours the story evolved.

An Australian woman contacted the media with what is apparently the inside scoop. Yes, the couple had been knocked to the ground, but they were fine – the photo taken at the very second the boyfriend gave his girlfriend a reassuring kiss amid the chaos.

When we look at the riot photos, images that are said to have permanently soiled Vancouver's reputation, we see young men acting out for the camera, revelling in the worst kind of apolitical theatre. Through the haze of this absurd and dispiriting pantomime, Richard Lam has captured an image of the rarest form. One that is as authentic as it is romantic and speaks to a present cultural context but also contains a certain timeless virtue.

What differentiates this riot from the countless other sports riots of the last decade is that Vancouver is pathologically self-aware. Its economy is dependent on the city's ability to portray itself as a quasi-utopia, and its citizens and politicians are obsessed with achieving the nebulous status of "world class".

The irony here is that Vancouver has at last produced an iconic image that rivals those of Paris and New York, but it needed to shatter its own fantasy to do so.