I've just added a bit of interesting stuff to the "Victory Kiss" post below. It's always fun to compare well-known pictures to little-known variants. (Shades of Bob Jackson and Jack Beers.)
If Alfred Eisenstaedt—for several decades one of the most prominent and well-known photographers in the world, and originally the quintessential Leica photographer (a position he seems to have lost in more recent times)—is getting far enough removed in history that he's less than comfortably familiar to you, you might want to seek out a copy of Witness to Our Time, first published in 1966 by Viking Press, reissued 1980*. It features a foreword by no less than Henry Luce, and is about as deluxe a production as mainstream photography books got in '66: gravure black-and-white printing, color plates generously interspersed. It's not easy to find anymore, exactly, but it's not hard to find either: they printed scads of them at the time, so it's quite possible you could still run across a copy in a garden-variety used book store. Many libraries will still have copies. It's almost quaint, but this was considered a big "coffee-table" book at the time. In the '80s, more or less, books this size became more the rule than the exception, and "big" books now have to be much bigger.
Check abebooks.com.
It's still a pleasure to look through. If you're not up to a search for the 1966 gold standard, check out a much more modest but somehow equally pleasing book called Remembrances from Little, Brown's Bulfinch imprint that came out a dozen years ago or so. Although not remotely a special, fancy, or arty book, Remembrances has very solid reproduction quality (it has a less cropped version of the V-J sailor's kiss than Witness), is very much a pleasure to peruse, and can serve as an ideal introduction to the wonderful Eisie.
Mike
*I haven't seen the reissue, so no thoughts about its adequacy.
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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
I always thought the quintessential Leica photographer was HCB. (As if that mattered...)
Posted by: Edi Weitz | Thursday, 18 August 2011 at 02:22 AM
Mike and Ctein,
Great column (and Ctein, I was an undergrad at Caltech '85) so please keep up the good work!
Anyhow, not to delve on the mysteries of "local reality," but I remember reading very clearly the famous Eisenstaedt picture that you mentioned was staged. There was a very good Wall Street Journal editorial a few years ago written by the priest of the sailor after he died. I looked, but couldn't find it on the internet.
In brief, as I remember the story, the gentlemen in the picture was actually engaged at the time of the photo. Eisenstaedt asked them to pose repeatedly until he got just the right shot. Anyhow, when the sailor's fiance and her mother saw the photo, they thought for sure that it was him. To not break his fiance's heart, he repeatedly swore to her that it wasn't him. They got married and remained happily so until her death many years later. After his wife died, he confessed to the Priest who kept the secret until the sailor himself passed away. The Priest then wrote the article for the Wall Street Journal (in 2003?). And, as I recall, the uniforms in the picture don't match VJ day, but are from VE day (Life used the picture for the former).
Anyhow, despite this, Eisenstaedt was a great photographer no doubt.
Cheers,
Steve
Posted by: Stephen Pitts | Thursday, 18 August 2011 at 07:55 AM
"I always thought the quintessential Leica photographer was HCB."
That's what everybody thinks now. But Eisie used to be that guy where Leicas are concerned--the first name you'd think of when you thought of Leica shooters.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Johnston | Thursday, 18 August 2011 at 08:24 AM
Steve,
Over the years, reportedly more than thirty men claimed to have been the sailor in the photo. One who was accepted as such for a while was later discredited. LIFE magazine, if memory serves, even did a feature years after the fact profiling all the many men who swore the picture was of themselves.
As usual, I believe the photographer, whose testimony is head and shoulders more reliable than the purported priest of one more claimant to the title, deceased no less.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Johnston | Thursday, 18 August 2011 at 08:35 AM
Thanks for making me look through my copies of "Remembrances" and "Eisenstaedt's Album" again :-)
Posted by: Soeren Engelbrecht | Thursday, 18 August 2011 at 05:08 PM