Eisenstaedt’s “The Kiss” loses another protagonist

One of the sailors involved in the war has died at the age of 96 symbolic photo of the end of the Second World War. Or at least, he was convinced he was. The photo is the iconic one taken in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedtand known as The Kiss, the kiss. The protagonist, or presumed one, is Carlo Muscarello (Moose)an American born to Sicilian parents who emigrated to New York after the First World War, who passed away last Tuesday in Georgia after a short illness, as his daughter Marie declared to Corriere Della Sera.

It was August 14, 1945 when US President Harry S. Truman announced victory over Japan and, consequently, the end of the Second World War. That day, now known in English-speaking countries as Victory over Japan Day (or with the acronym VJ Day), a New York thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate. Among these, a very young Muscarello to whom, together with his colleagues, his commander had granted free exit. For decades no one knew exactly who the protagonists of the shot were, which is still difficult to establish today, but there were many of them over the years to claim paternity. The uncertainty is due to the fact that the photo taken by Eisenstaedt’s Leica and published in the magazine Lifewas not the only one to be made that day.

He was also there on the streets of New York, immortalizing another young couple in the act of kissing US Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen. Same image, but different perspectives. Jorgensen’s photo was published the next day by the New York Times and attributed, according to some, to the sailor George Mendonça, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 95 (he was also convinced that he was the protagonist of Eisenstaedt’s shot). Again, according to the facial results of some forensic studies conducted by Lois Gibson for the Houston Police Department, to have kissed the twenty-six-year-old nurse Greta Zimmer Friedman fu Glenn McDuffie. While Muscarello was recognized in 2005 Edith Shainthe first woman to come forward as a nurse, later considered too short to be the one in the German photographer’s image.

In short, many images, many protagonists, no certainty: one of the most famous photos in history is also one of the most mysterious. Returning to Mosse (or whoever), the iconic kiss was not planned. Muscarello himself will say that he drank a few too many beers that day and that he had kissed spontaneously the nurse you just met on the street; while Greta Zimmer Friedman, who did not confirm that it was Mosse, was instead categorical on one point: the kiss was not consensual. This led several people, in more recent years, to hypothesize that more than a romantic gesture, that of the sailor towards the nurse was a real violence.

Eisenstaedt took four images in the space of a few seconds, and chose one. The right one. The one that made the history of photography. The one that continues to carry all his secrets with her.