Figure 1 -Prime Minister Winston Churchill flashing the V for victory after announcing the end of war in Europe to the British people on May 8, 1945. In the public domain.

As we contemplate Memorial Day today, we should also consider the fact that May 8th was the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day or VE Day, marking the surrender of Nazi Germany to the allies.  Figure 1 – is an outstanding image from that day showing Winston Churchill waving to crowds in Whitehall after his announcement to the British people that the war in Europe was over. It raises the hair on the back of your neck as do a series of VE Day images from NBC News.

A couple of these images particularly move me.  The first is a photograph by Harry Harris for the AP showing New Yorkers jamming Times Square on May 7, 1945 upon hearing the news of victory and the second is an image by R. J. Salmon from Getty Images showing soldiers from the Women’s Royal Army Corps driving their service vehicle through Trafalgar Square during V-E Day celebrations in London.  If you stop and think about it so much races through your mind when you see such images.  It is as ever the power of photography, and I will even go so far as to say especially of black and white photography.

The sensations are complex. Consider the Times Square image.  For those people, it was the defining moment of their generation.  My eye is distracted by the theater marque.  Alan Ladd and Gail Russell in “Salty O’Rourke.” There is the man holding the newspaper with the huge headline “Nazi’s Quit.”  This was my parents’ generation, and I keep searching the crowd for them – perhaps the man with the cigar.  I search even though I know that they weren’t there.The significant point is that photography not only transports us back to that historic moment, but it actually puts us into the skins of those people.  By the magic of a silver gelatin emulsion we are transformed.

Also I think about how almost all of those people are gone now.  They have fallen, in the end, victims of the common maladies that lead to our demise.  This was their second defining moment.  The first was the moment that global war against Evil became inevitable, when the free peoples of the world united in their cause against tyranny.  It was not a choice that anyone would make lightly.  Indeed it was thrust upon most of them.  It was not a conscious choice  I suppose that this is what Memorial Day is all about – real people rising to greatness, to become what Tom Brokaw has called “The Greatest Generation.”