Unconditional Surrender – Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton Township, Trenton, New Jersey

On August 14, 1945, a crowd of 750,000 people gathered in Times Square, eyes eyes fixed on the Times Tower. At 7:03pm, the words finally blazed across the news zipper: "OFFICIAL – TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER." Times Square exploded in a collective cry of joy and relief. By 10pm, the crowd had swelled to more than 2 million, as New Yorkers flooded the Square.

The moment was famously captured by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was in the square when he spotted a sailor "running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight." Just south of 45th Street, looking north, he famously snapped a photo of the sailor kissing a nurse, with neither of their faces clearly shown, which ran in Time Life magazine with the caption, "In New York’s Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers." Johnson’s Unconditional Surrender, however, is modeled after a photograph taken by U.S. Navy photo journalist Victor Jorgensen entitled, Kissing the War Good Bye, which captured another view of the same scene and was published in the New York Times the following day. Jorgensen’s photo, unlike Eisenstaedt’s, remains in the public domain.



Unconditional Surrender, a monumental 25-foot sculpture depicting the famous VJ-Day kiss, was cast by J. Seward Johnson in 2005. Unconditional Surrender debuted as a bronze life-size sculpture in Times Square on August 14, 2005. A 25-foot styrofoam version was part of a temporary exhibition in Sarasota, Florida. he then started making 25-foot versions out of plastic and aluminum, which have been installed in San Diego and New Jersey