For a long time, I have been acquainted with the famous photograph of V-J Day in Times Square. Captured by Alfred Eisenstaedt, the image portrays an American Navy sailor embracing and kissing a total stranger on V-J Day in New York City. The photo, centering the kissing characters with their backs to Times Square, was prominently featured in LIFE magazine.

The original interpretations of the photograph centered on the jubilation of the 1945 V-J Day celebrations: the sailor representing returning troops, the nurse representing those who would welcome them home, and Times Square standing for home. However, what intrigues me is the vastly different interpretations and critiques it has received in contemporary times.

In the 2010s, bloggers began calling the photograph a documentation of a type of normalized sexual assault. The people pictured in the photograph did not previously know one another. Drunk at the time of the photograph, the sailor is shown kissing an unwilling partner (according to historic preservationist Kafi Benz, among the four frames taken by Eisenstaedt, available through Getty Images, the woman is shown defensively hitting the man in the face with the closed fist of her one, free arm). The woman who is a subject in the photograph, dental assistant Greta Zimmer Friedman, had also explicitly stated that the kiss she was subjected to, was not a consensual act, that he just "grabbed" her. Combined with bemused expressions on some of the bystanders and the sailor's firm grasp of the nurse, the situation has been described as emblematic of a time when women were "subordinated to men", or, that of a rape culture.

In my exploration on the Getty Images website, I encountered numerous archived video records depicting celebrations of the WWII victory, often featuring many instances of soldiers kissing girls in the streets. The prevalence of such similar scenes prompted me to ponder: were these girls acting voluntarily? The documentation of such scenes might have been influenced by the fact that predominantly men controlled cameras at that time. The photographers, immersed in the atmosphere of victory, might have construed this behavior as amusing and unremarkable.

A female perspective on this matter might have been starkly different. Would a female photographer have noticed the reluctance of the women involved in these interactions and intervened? Women are conspicuously absent from the imagery, they merely appear as appendages to the joyous celebrations of men post-victory.

I created a story that is recorded from three perspectives: surveillance, female photographer, and male photographer, and I also used GoPro to record the perspective videos of people during shooting. I chose Wellington Arch, which was the scene of World War II celebration events in London, as the location. With two models imagining a celebratory scene, male and female photographers captured the moments of their brief enactment. Neither photographer knew what events might unfold; everything was spontaneous. I then integrated all the images and footage into a cohesive video to illustrate the differences in how the same event was recorded from different genders' perspectives, encouraging multidimensional thinking.

This serves as a speculative extension of the V-J Day in Times Square photograph and attempts, through a personal approach, to animate historical images and imbue them with new meanings, thereby creating a new visual archive.