"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." - Alfred Eisenstaedt
In a fashion that would make cinema proud a kiss delivers an iconic moment in real life, real time and real frame. Sure weʻve seen it before but thereʻs just so much about this photo that makes the air in my lungs feel a little brighter. Maybe it helps to clear the residue left by the fabricated moments and computer generated imagination that fill our everyday pours. Maybe itʻs just that classics are classics and always will be. Maybe it speaks to life waiting when looking. Or the magic of the right moment when stolen out of time and set free yielding resounding significance in, well, just a simple frame.
1 comments:
So I've found this posting on Memorial Day (ironic) and have been moved by your comments to, as you put it, a "simple frame." As I've been slowly following your posts on FB & elsewhere, I was surprised at the structural language you use here, whereas recently you've been much more postmodern in approach to life.
Partly because I see nothing simple to this photograph. And partly because of the challenge we miss by dismissing this photograph as
"classic," a challenge against media to interrogate the obvious simplicity presented to us in everyday life.
Two other versions of this seemingly "classic" event (which I would urge be viewed as "traditional," which doesn't have the the timeless essentialism of "class") can be found with a quick google search.
1)Another photographer took the same moment from a different perspective, which informs the more notorious photograph with historic materialism. Removed from the backdrop of the city, this moment "happens," is witnessed by others more closely and experienced with tension by the nurse who, upon inspection, is clenching her fist. This tension further informs our understanding of the gendered elements to this scene, which are, too, historically constructed.
2)This informed knowledge is reinforced by a scene in the Watchmen (which I haven't seen but am now intrigued). The Watchmen deconstructs this moment (which can be found on youtube) and reconstructs it with the historical material of the time, with much irony. Instead of a Sailor walking through the crowd, we have a Super-Heroine, a statement which speaks volumes to the ideation of the military as powerful, righteous, and almost super-human.
What's more is that the Super-hero is female. This presentation of power as feminine informs us not only of the gendered elements of the photograph, but of the gendering of history; The passive quality of the subdued nurse against the dominant posture of the sailor speaks to the constructed image that is not a classic, essential position between the sexes, but a Western Tradition to present men and women in dichotomous gender roles-men as power, women as submissive.
In actuality there are two Heros in this photograph, both who fought to win the war.
I applaud your desire to deconstruct life in your obvious search for truth. I urge you to interrogate what you see, with a historicity in focus, and de-center yourself from the positions from which you've seen the world. Much like swallowing the Red Pill, you can be informed by taking the standpoints of, as some would say "the Other," who remains silent, bound by the throat (as in the photograph), and lacks the knowledge, position, or power to tell the stories of history.
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