Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"In Times Square on V.J. Day, I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing every girl in sight. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse....I took exactly four pictures. It was done within a few seconds."
The photograph that "Life" printed that Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) took in Times Square, New York City, on August 14, 1945 of "the kiss heard around the world" is one of the famous photographs in American history. Considered the father of photojournalism, Eisenstaedt first began creating photo essays in Berlin during the 1920s and early 1930s. When he emigrated to the United States in 1935 he joined the original photography staff at "Life" magazine and a decade later he took the photograph that appears on this 22 x 28 art poster that has come to symbolized the joy of peace being declared ever since it first appeared in "Life."
According to a follow up article "Life" did in 1980 the sailor in the famous photograph was Bill Swicegood or George Mendonsa or Clarence "Bud" Harding or Jack Russell or Marvin Kingsbury or James Kearney or Walker Irving or Donald Bonsack or John Edmonson or Arthur Leask or Wallace C. Fowler (who confessed to his wife). Each points to a different part of the sailor as proof (a hairline, a mole, the positioning of the left hand, a newly acquired Quartermaster 1st Class rating patch, or a bare patch). At that point only three women claimed to be the girl being kissed, Edith Shain, Greta Friedman, and Barbara Sokol. Apparently there was a lot of kissing going on in Times Square on V-J Day, and the fact that you cannot really see the faces of the sailor and the nurse actually creates a universality to the kissing figures that makes the photograph so compelling.
In 1989 "Time" did a special issue on "150 Years of Photo Journalism" and named Eisenstaedt's photograph one of the ten greatest images in the history of photojournalism. For the record, the others were: The flag raising at Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, Alexander Gardner's posed photograph of a dead Confederate sharpshooter at the Devil's Den at Gettysburg, the "Hindenburg" disaster captured by Sam Shere, Dorothea Lange's haunting photograph of a migrant mother, the death of a loyalist solider captured by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald taken by Robert Jackson, the execution of a Viet Cong officer by a South Vietnamese police chief caught by Eddie Adams, Neil Armstrong's shot of Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon, and W. Eugene Smith's photograph of a mother bathing her son whose body has been deformed by mercury poisoning in the Japanese fishing village of Minimata.
Click Here to see more reviews about: V-J Day at Times Square, New York City, 1945, Art Poster by Alfred Eisenstaedt
The most eagerly awaited event in the editorial cycle at TIME Magazine is always the selection of the cover. The best covers capture the zeitgeist of the week while surviving the judgment of history. As browsing this collection of TIME cover art prints shows, TIME is as good a record as any of who and what mattered over the past 80-plus years. And so when TIME captures a person, an event or a trend within its iconic red borders, the magazine is adding that extra dose of significance that no other publication can quite match.That is one reason why the original artwork for more than 800 TIME covers now resides in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Thanks to an amazing roster of artists, photographers and graphic designers, from TIME's earliest charcoal drawings of cover subjects to its later black-and-white photography to the more recent paintings and stunning color photography, TIME covers have always been, sometimes quite literally, works of great art. And, while the times may change, the TIME cover, with its iconic red border, has never lost its power to immediately send the signal that this person or event or idea is important to our lives, that in some way history is being made before our eyes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment