V-J Day in Times Square. August 14, 1945

Alfred Eisenstaedt

1945

Photograph of sailor grabbing and kissing a woman in a busy city street with people and buildings in background.

Alfred Eisenstaedt shot one of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century in Times Square, where crowds were gathering to watch the electric news ticker for an anticipated announcement by U.S. President Harry S. Truman about the end of the war with Japan (marking the end of World War II). The sailor in the photo has been identified as George Mendonsa. The woman in the nursing uniform is believed to be Greta Zimmer Friedman, a Jewish dental hygienist on her lunch break. She escaped from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but her parents were killed in Auschwitz. 

Credits

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Alfred Eisenstaedt

1898–1995

Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt created some of the most memorable images of twentieth-century American popular culture. Born in Dirschau, German Empire (now Tczew, Poland), Eisenstaedt began his career as a freelance photojournalist in Germany, where he attended the University of Berlin. During World War I, he served in the German army. As political tensions rose in the mid-1930s, Eisenstaedt left Berlin for New York where he continued to freelance, working for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Town and Country. In 1936, he was hired as one of the first staff photographers at Life magazine, where he worked for the next forty years, producing more than 2,500 photo essays for it.

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