The Kiss Worth a Thousand Words

Writers like me probably don't like to admit this, but the cliche really is true: A picture is worth a thousand words.

The most recent well-publicized example of that maxim was the re-publication of the famous V-J Day photo showing an American sailor kissing a nurse amid the celebrations that took place for weeks after the announcement that World War II had finally, exhaustively ended with the surrender of Japan. This photo summed up what many people were feeling during those heady times:

• relief: the men and women who survived the war would be coming soon. Indeed, this sailor was already home and showing how happy he was about it.
  
  
• sadness: on the part of the nurses like the woman in the photo, who had cared for so many sick, injured, and dying during the seemingly never-ending days and nights when the world was at war.
  
  
• exhilaration: at the idea that the "winning" side in the war was not the totalitarian regimes of the Axis powers but, rather, of the representative-government countries known as the Allies.
  
  
• happiness: more than anything else, the kiss is a symbol of joy, of shared attraction, of experience binding two people together, if only for a fleeting moment.

All of those words together do not equal the power of that one image, beautifully photographed.

The photo, published by Life magazine, made even more famous the name of Alfred Eisenstaedt, already a well-known photographer. It also created quite a mystery as the identify of the two people kissing.

Long after the initial publication, in 1980, when retrospectives had published the photo again and again, Eisenstaedt gave the name of the nurse: Edith Shain. Her name and her famous photo became headlines again this week, when she died at 91. In the 30 years since she was identified, she got the opportunity to lay wreaths at veterans cemeteries and otherwise remember those she cared for and those who didn't make it back.

She also got to meet the sailor again. Turns out he was Carl Muscarello, now a retired police detective. The two met again, knowingly this time, in 1995 and were friends until Shain died.

Their moment in time, frozen in the black-and-white image that symbolized all of those ideas, is part of our history, a part that resides in the head and the heart and the memory as an image that needs no words.