Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s

As art historian Nemerov (To Make a World) reminds us in this exceptional set of reflections on photography and history, photographs bring a lost moment and person directly into our view, so that what was and what is coalesce in eerie combination. Nemerov focuses on several photos and film stills from the 1940s ranging from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day and John Swope’s luscious 1940 photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on the grass at a picnic, to Margaret Bourke-White’s photos of bombing runs over Berlin in 1943. Walter Sanders’s Life cover photo, Ballet Swimmer, captures actress and athlete Belita Jepson-Turner descending vertically into a still pool and “speaks of peace, of peacefulness” while at the same time representing a bomb descending much like the one that had been recently dropped over Hiroshima. The aesthetic and the historical intersect in Sanders’s photo and others. Nemerov’s radiant meditations cast a penetrating glance into the moments captured in the photos and the larger stories they reflect. (Dec.)