V-J Day in Times Square

On August 14, 1945, as news of Japan's surrender swept Times Square, LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt was moving through the crowd with his Leica IIIa when a sailor grabbed a nurse and kissed her. Eisenstaedt caught four frames; one became the defining image of the war's end.

He later said he was drawn by the sailor "running along the street grabbing any and every girl in white." No posing, no flash, no second chance — the argument for the pocketable rangefinder, made in one frame. The photograph is LIFE/Getty copyrighted, so we link rather than reproduce. The image displayed here is Victor Jorgensen's public-domain frame of the same moment, shot from another angle by a U.S. Navy photographer — not Eisenstaedt's copyrighted Leica frame.