“The Kiss of Life captures a man’s bravery as he rescues a colleague, immortalized in the striking photograph he took.”

In the summer of 1967, a routine workday in Jacksonville, Florida, became the setting for one of the most powerful images in photojournalism history. The photograph, later titled **“The Kiss of Life,”** captured a split-second act of courage that saved a man’s life and forever defined the career of the photographer who witnessed it.

Rocco Morabito, a photographer for the *Jacksonville Journal*, was driving to cover an ordinary assignment when he noticed a crowd gathering near a utility pole. What he saw unfolding was anything but ordinary. Electrical line worker J.D. Champion had accidentally made contact with a high-voltage line—more than 4,000 volts—rendering him unconscious. Though a safety harness kept Champion from falling, the shock stopped his breathing and pulse, leaving him suspended and lifeless high above the street.

Champion’s coworker, Randall G. Thompson, reacted instantly. Without hesitation and with no medical equipment available, Thompson climbed the pole and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while balancing at a dangerous height. His calm focus and quick thinking were the difference between life and death.

As the rescue unfolded, Morabito’s journalistic instincts took over. He positioned himself and captured the decisive moment: Thompson delivering lifesaving breaths to Champion, both men suspended against the sky. The image froze an intensely human connection—urgency, compassion, and bravery—in a single frame.

Champion survived and fully recovered. Thompson, ever humble, later said he “just reacted,” downplaying the heroism the world attributed to him. Morabito’s photograph, however, went on to receive international recognition. In 1968, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.

More than five decades later, “The Kiss of Life” remains iconic. It endures not only for its technical excellence, but because it reveals a universal truth: in moments of crisis, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary courage—and sometimes, a single decisive act can mean the difference between life and death.