‘The Kissing Sailor’ | New England’s Gifts
They’re an unlikely pairing for immortality together: Alfred Eisenstaedt, a German-born photographer who roamed New York with his Leica for Life magazine, and George Mendonça, a young sailor, just back from World War II, who was raised in a Rhode Island fishing family and would soon return to that life. In a Times Square instant […]
By Mel Allen
Oct 02 2015
‘The Kissing Sailor’
Photo Credit : Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesPhoto Credit : Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
They’re an unlikely pairing for immortality together: Alfred Eisenstaedt, a German-born photographer who roamed New York with his Leica for Life magazine, and George Mendonça, a young sailor, just back from World War II, who was raised in a Rhode Island fishing family and would soon return to that life.
In a Times Square instant on August 14, 1945, Eisenstaedt’s eye and Mendonça’s inebriated elation at the war’s end came together in the photo that ever since has charmed the country.