V-J Day in Times Square — Facebook screenshot of the V-J Day kiss photo with a caption protesting attempts to ban it

V-J Day in Times Square

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Published October 4, 2026

V-J Day in Times Square, also known as The Kiss, is Alfred Eisenstaedt's August 14th, 1945 photograph of a U.S. Navy sailor dipping and kissing a woman in a white dress during Times Square celebrations of Japan's surrender1. LIFE magazine ran the picture the following week in its Victory Celebrations feature, and it later became the source of decades of identification feuds, anniversary reenactments and parody edits online4.

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Overview

V-J Day in Times Square shows a tall sailor with his left arm wrapped around a dental assistant's waist, bending her backward in a kiss while onlookers grin in the background. Eisenstaedt shot it with a Leica camera, firing four frames in quick succession as he chased the sailor through the crowd1. Navy photojournalist Victor Jorgensen captured the same embrace from a different angle, and his version ran in The New York Times the next day under the title Kissing the War Goodbye1.

Jorgensen's photo sits in the public domain, which is why it circulates freely in textbooks, Wikipedia articles and anniversary posts, while Eisenstaedt's copyrighted frame tends to appear through LIFE's licensed archive4. The copyright split is a big part of why the Jorgensen angle shows up on most meme reposts even though Eisenstaedt's shot is the one people picture when they hear The Kiss.

Origin & Background

Platform
LIFE magazine (print) / Wikipedia and news coverage (online afterlife)
Creator
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Date
1945

Eisenstaedt took the V-J Day in Times Square photograph on the afternoon of August 14th, 1945, hours after President Truman announced that Japan had agreed to surrender and ended World War II. The frame ran a week later inside LIFE's Victory Celebrations spread, and the magazine would later call it one of its most recognized images1. Neither the sailor nor the woman was named with the original caption, and Eisenstaedt said he never caught their names in the chaos of the celebration, which set up the identity dispute that followed decades later4.

How It Spread

The anonymity of the V-J Day in Times Square subjects turned the photo into a decades-long identity puzzle. In August 1980, LIFE asked readers to help find the pair, and 11 men and three women stepped forward claiming to be in the frame1. In August 2005, a Naval War College volunteer team, working with photographic analysis from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and expert Richard M. Benson, matched sailor George Mendonsa to the image using his scars and tattoos; dental assistant Greta Zimmer Friedman was identified as the woman in the white dress4.

The book The Kissing Sailor later laid out that identification in full and became the standard reference for the Mendonsa-Friedman account3. The Daily Mail published a competing claim in 2007 that forensic analysis supported Houston veteran Glenn McDuffie as the sailor2. When McDuffie died in March 2014, major outlets including the BBC reproduced his version of events in their obituaries, which kept the dueling-claimants story circulating online well after the Mendonsa identification was considered settled by historians5.

Timeline

1945-08-14

Alfred Eisenstaedt photographs the sailor kissing the woman in white in Times Square on V-J Day; Victor Jorgensen shoots the same moment from another angle.

1945-08-15

Jorgensen's angle runs in The New York Times under the title Kissing the War Goodbye.

1945-08

Eisenstaedt's frame appears in LIFE magazine's Victory Celebrations feature.

1980-08

LIFE asks the kissers to come forward; 11 men and three women claim to be in the photo.

2005-08

Naval War College volunteers, with help from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and analyst Richard M. Benson, identify George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman as the pair.

2007

The Daily Mail reports that forensic analysis supports Glenn McDuffie's rival claim to be the sailor.

2014-03

Glenn McDuffie dies; BBC and other outlets re-air his claim in his obituaries, keeping the identity debate alive.

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