Woman in iconic WWII Times Square kiss photograph dies at 92

The kiss she got from a US sailor in New York’s Times Square became one of the most iconic images of celebrations after the Japanese surrendered in World War II.

The photo was first published in Life, buried deep within the magazine’s pages.

Greta Zimmer Friedman died Thursday at a Richmond, Virginia, hospital of what her son called complications from old age. Friedman didn’t know the sailor, George Mendonsa, who grabbed who he thought was a nurse and planted a kiss.

The black-and-white photo captured a nation’s relief and joy at wars’ end, with dozens of sailors and civilians celebrating on the street as Mendonsa kissed Friedman.

“If she (Friedman) had been dressed in a dark dress I would never have taken the picture”. The exhibition showing some 150 pictures taken from 1936 when the United States magazine Life magazine premiered will be open from May, 1 to August 4, 2013. “It was done within a few seconds”.

The woman who was kissed by an ecstatic sailor in Times Square celebrating the end of World War II has died at the age of 92.

The authors, George Galdorisi and Lawrence Verria, said they figured out the identities “through forensic analysis, through photographic interpretation and through some other technical means”, according to a Daily News story.

On V-J Day, Aug. 14, 1945, she was 21 and working as a dental assistant, according to the Associated Press.

Mendonsa and Friedman were not identified until 1980 when Life asked the unknown pair to come forward.

Mendonsa is retired and living in Rhode Island. She and two sisters fled from the Nazis in 1938. Her son confirmed it to the New York Daily News on Saturday. Mr Friedman died in 1998.

Her husband, Dr. Misha Friedman, is buried at Arlington and she will be buried next to him.