Life magazine first published Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous V-J Day Times Square photograph.
The image appeared in Life in 1945 as part of a special section devoted to victory celebrations across the United States. Eisenstaedt’s photograph received a prominent full-page presentation, helping it become an enduring visual symbol of the end of the Pacific War.
The photograph shows a sailor kissing a woman in a white uniform in New York’s Times Square on August 14, 1945. The woman, Greta Zimmer Friedman, was a dental assistant rather than a nurse, a detail often misstated in captions and popular retellings.
Life was a major American picture magazine known for using photojournalism to tell national and international stories. Another photographer, Victor Jorgensen, made a related image from a different angle, but it was Eisenstaedt’s Life photograph that became the iconic version most people recognize.