If photographs are kisses, what about photographs of kisses. It turns out that kisses and kissing has been a fairly prominent theme in photography. I set out to find the five most famous kiss photographs and immediately found that there were a lot of them. However, the number gets manageable if you ignore famous smooches of the cinema. So here is my selection in chronological order.

1. First, we have to ignore the no cinema rule and start with the very first screen kiss. Thomas A. Edison’s short film “May Irwin Kiss, 1896?” It asks the age old question about first kisses that persists to this day and was a major scandal at the time of its release. The film is around 18 seconds long, and depicts a re-enactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the final scene of the stage musical, The Widow Jones. Said one critic: “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting”
2. The second is one of those decisive moments by André Kertecz (1894-1985) called alternatively “The Kiss” or “The Lovers” Budapest 1915. This photograph is famous, certainly, and brings to real-life coyness of the lady in the moment. “Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
3. Third I think must be Man Ray’s(1890-1976) innovative  “Rayograph Kiss,1922” taken without the benefit of camera. A photogram is a picture made on photographic paper without the aid of a camera.
4. Fourth must be Alfred Eisenstaedt’s (1898-1995) 1945 image of a sailor spontaneously kissing a nurse on VJ day in Times Square in NYC.
5. Fifth and finally, we have Annie Leibowitz’s 1980 photograph of a naked John Lennon kissing a fully clothed Yoko Ono.

All great and memorable kisses!