Orkin's photograph stands right in the middle of the American century

In the Observer, dependable Geoff Dyer is oft-brilliant dissecting the meanings of Ruth Orkin's photograph, "Times Square, V-E Day, NYC, 1945" (search for "Ruth Orkin" twice for image): "Photographs depict a moment but they can contain years, decades. Few, however, are as saturated with history as Ruth Orkin's picture of the crowd in Times Square on VE Day, 8 May, 1945... The office block in the middle of Orkin's picture shares the high-prowed magnificence of the Flatiron building to such an extent that it looks, almost, like an ocean liner surging into the future. The name of this ship? ...The figurehead makes that obvious: the SS Liberty. Although we are seeing an actual place, it is as if various geographically dispersed symbols of New York have been compressed into a composite of the city, a concentration of everything American that is at once mythic and real... What makes this picture so contemporary, though, is not the woman's presence but her posture. What is she doing? Cut her out of this 1945 photo and paste her into a shot of St Peter's from Pope John Paul II's funeral and you would swear she was talking on a mobile phone... Taken in the middle of New York, Orkin's photograph stands right in the middle of the American century which began with the larking crowds of 1914 and ended with the shocked onlookers gazing in disbelief at the World Trade Centre on 11 September, 2001."