V-J Day in Times Square

The subtractive test, run on a frame its maker did not compose at leisure. The embrace is the work and cannot go, and its halves require each other: the dark uniform and the white, which make the figures read as one shape at any size; the arm locked round her waist and her body bent in a near arc, which give the frame its one strong diagonal; the two faces hidden in the kiss, which make the pair anonymous and so able to stand for everyone. The witnesses behind are required too: they make the act public, a celebration and not a private scene. What yields is the margin: the clutter of the crowd, the shop fronts, the figures cut by the frame’s sides. The centre is necessary; the frame around it is found.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Two things are brought into the open. The first is intended: the release of a city at the end of a war, the body’s joy after years of restraint, a public licence in which strangers embrace. That is largely mood, rendered with great force, and mood ranks below meaning. The second is not intended: the frame holds, in plain sight, the posture of a seizure: the sailor’s grip, her arm pinned and bent, her body yielding backward rather than meeting him, the uniform of the man who has won the war taking what the moment allows. That reading is not imported; it was in the frame in 1945, and it lifts the axis above mood. It is held below 8 because the photograph shows it without knowing it, and its own address is jubilation.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The elevation is of one kind and one height: transport, an instant in which a war ends in a body. The woman bent in an arc at the bottom of the dip, the white against the dark, the light of a summer afternoon across the square, the smiling faces behind: on first sight the effect is a held breath of joy, and it is real. It does not recur within the image, since one exposure holds one instant. There is no second height, no grandeur of setting in a square crowded and ordinary, no terror, and the margins are flat. Over eighty years the joy has also been weighed down for many viewers by the second reading of the posture, which complicates it without deepening it into the dreadful. One summit moment, high in its kind.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The strongest of the deep axes here, because the archetype is built, not alluded to. The warrior returns and takes the woman; the end of war is an embrace; peace is a kiss in the public square. The image makes the pattern load-bearing by its means: the faces are hidden, so the pair are a sailor and a woman in white, nobody in particular and everyone; the uniforms are their identities; the crowd is the chorus. And it stays particular: a real square, a real afternoon, a creased trouser, a handbag, a stride. Held below 8 because the archetype built is the shallow one of the victory poster and the romance, homecoming as reward, not nostos with its costs; and because the white uniform’s suggestion of a nurse is a misreading the image invites, not a built meaning.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the candid 35 mm photograph of the 1920s and 1930s, of Salomon, Kertész and Eisenstaedt himself in the German illustrated press, carried to America in the picture magazine Life, which he had served from its first year. The image departs from none of it. It is a candid street photograph of a public event, taken on the run, chosen from a sequence and run full page, as Life ran hundreds. There is no new way of seeing in it: the means were the photographer’s ordinary means, and the event did the rest. The stake was nil; a press photographer’s risk at a celebration is to miss the picture, not to wager on form. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and the axis stands, with The Encompassed, lowest of the twelve.

Score: 6.4 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Much would go. Its knowledge is the knowledge of an instant that was not posed. A painting of this embrace would be a picture of victory, a poster; the photograph is evidence that it happened, here, to these two, on this afternoon, and that is the source both of its joy and of its later trouble. Only the camera could hold the dip at its lowest point with the faces behind turning at the same moment. The black and white is part of it: it reduces the square to the contrast of two uniforms, so that the shape reads at the size of a stamp. Held below 8 because much of what it knows survives in another frame of the same event, and because its knowledge is the snapshot’s, not a form found for this content.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: eighty-one years of return, and the return has yielded, though mostly about the image rather than within it. Who the two were: decades of claimants, investigations, a book, forensic comparisons of faces and hands. What the act was: celebration, assault, or both at once, a question the image raised in the twenty-first century and has not settled. How the published frame stands to the others of its sequence, and to Victor Jorgensen’s photograph of the same embrace from another angle. These questions are real, and the image keeps them open. But formal return is limited: once read, the composition is read, and a tenth look shows the same arc, the same contrast, the same witnesses. The well is deep in its reception and shallow in the frame.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photojournalism and the picture magazine of the 1940s. Intrinsic force is low: the image reorganises no possibility of photography; it is a fine instance of what Life and the 35 mm candid had already made possible, and the decade’s real turns in the field lie elsewhere, in the war photographs of Capa and W. Eugene Smith and in the decisive moment as a doctrine. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the picture by which the end of the war is remembered in the United States; it is answered in Seward Johnson’s Unconditional Surrender sculptures and re-enacted by couples in Times Square on anniversaries. That is reach as an icon. It did not redirect how photographs were made.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-one years. Form: whole. The image as published survives entire in the magazine’s printing, and the photographer’s later prints carry the same frame. Presence: as wide as any photograph’s, reproduced continuously since 1945; but much of it is fame and sale, posters and signed prints, which lift the figure a tenth at most, and the presence has turned: it is now shown as often as a question as a celebration. The axis penalises a surface fixed to its moment, and this surface is of a single afternoon; yet it has plainly outlived the war, the magazine and the generation that made it. Fabric: a silver negative and its prints, at no particular risk. The usual figure for its span, not the widest.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of the 35 mm candid photograph, to the same anchors as every medium. The making that is there is real and decisive: the photographer saw the embrace coming, moved, and released the shutter at the lowest point of the dip, with the pair centred and whole, white and dark side by side, the exposure holding the white uniform without burning it out in the afternoon light, and the witnesses’ faces legible behind. To catch that in seconds is command of the medium at speed. The charges: the frame is found, not composed; its margins are crowded and cut, figures sliced at the sides; the published frame was chosen from the sequence with the editors; and luck carries part of the result, which Cartier-Bresson’s frames control more tightly. Load-bearing at the centre, incidental at the edges.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the pair at the centre and the strangers behind them, a smiling sailor and passers-by. One law holds them: everything in the frame takes part in, or witnesses, a single public release, and every visible face is turned to it or caught in its own pleasure. The light obeys it, falling evenly on a square at ease. Nothing contradicts the law of celebration except what the second reading finds in the posture at the centre, and that is a tension within the image’s subject, not a breach of its order. But the range is narrow, one place, one instant, one register, and the background holds incident that is not governed, a figure walking out of the frame, the indifferent fronts of the square. A law held over a small and partly unruled field.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The orders held: history and the state, the end of a world war on the day it ended, carried by the uniforms; the erotic, in the embrace; the city and its public, in the crowd and the square; gender and power, in who holds and who is held; class and service, a sailor and a woman in a working uniform. One gesture at the centre integrates them in one instant, which is the image’s achievement. What holds the axis, with The Swerve the lowest of the twelve, is that most of these are present only by implication: the war is wholly absent except as uniform, there is no labour but in the white dress, no family, no sacred order, and no consciousness, since both faces are hidden. A single frame of a single gesture: the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.4 / 10