Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites

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Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites | The Times Square Kiss: Iconic Photography and Civic Renewal in U.S. Public Culture | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

The Times Square Kiss: Iconic Photography and Civic Renewal in U.S. Public Culture

Two decades ago Thomas Bender called on historians to incorporate the many new forms of social explanation into an expanded conception of political history. Distinguishing such inquiry from consensus history and cautioning against a narrative hegemony, Bender proposed that the focal point for this work be "the making of a public culture." That culture would be both the site where social groups contested for the power to define the nation, and the product of that dynamic, contingent process of public representation. By exploring how power is made manifest in, flows through, and assigns meaning to cultural phenomena, one could again fulfill "the social role of the historian, who seeks, as the novelist Henry James and the historian Henry Adams understood so well, to create the images of society that become 'the mirror in which society looks at itself.'"¹

It seems that Bender was swimming against a very strong current, and we doubt there is much interest today in narrative synthesis on behalf of "our common life as a people and as a nation." Likewise, "cultural studies" now references three decades of work in many disciplines on cultural phenomena as sites for domination, resistance, and negotiation. The concept of "public culture," however, remains a vital idea that has just begun to be developed. By focusing on the public, it features a democratic understanding of the political that goes to the center of modern norms of legitimacy; by emphasizing culture, it features the media, arts, and other communicative practices that shape identity and agency throughout modern societies. As Bender wished, public culture is distinct from "mere social collectivities or cultural pastiches"; it also must include a stronger emphasis on public media than he imagined if the historian is to grasp how a democratic society works in practice.²

When Adams, Bender, and others speak of the images by which "society looks at itself," they are likely to be using the terms metaphorically. But how does society see itself? Much of the time, by seeing. People form, maintain, and continually revise their conception of themselves as a people by looking at images in the public media. They look at presidents, big league hitters, hurricane victims, and voters; terrorists, soldiers, talking heads, protesters; firemen rescuing cats, kids sliding down water slides, immigrants waving flags on the Fourth of July, the homeless sleeping under bridges; the list goes on and on, changing every day and every day the same. These are the images of U.S. public culture.

Against this background of nonstop media production, some images acquire exceptional significance. The Statue of Liberty is one such icon, a symbolically and emotionally resonant image that is widely reproduced, widely recognized, and often appropriated for political, commercial, artistic, or social objectives. Other iconic images come directly from the leading public art of the twentieth century, photojournalism.³ They include a young woman screaming over a murdered student at Kent State University, marines raising the flag during the battle of Iwo Jima, and the Hindenburg airship exploding while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey. They are not all "American faces," but they are faces of America, part of an ongoing portrait of the traumas, challenges, and gambles of modern public life. In this essay we want to feature another iconic photo: that of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. (See figure 1.) Although one cannot see the face of either the sailor or the nurse, it is a picture of personal intimacy in a public space, and it puts a face on the impromptu civic festival of that day and on the moment when World War II became history, a backdrop against which the nation would return from the struggle for life and liberty to the pursuit of happiness.

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