For anyone alive during the twentieth century, “Extra! Extra! News Photographs from 1903-1975,” a show of vintage images at the Howard Greenberg gallery (through Nov. 16), is full of triggering flashbacks—moments we could swear we witnessed, and, in some cases, did. Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert F. Kennedy dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, the Hindenberg in flames, an execution in the street in Saigon. Seeing these images again as they were first distributed, as grainy black-and-white prints with crude crop marks and a wealth of scribbled and printed information on the back, grounds them in history but doesn’t disturb their terrible, marvellous immediacy. The girl kneeling next to the body of a dead student at Kent State on May 4, 1970, will never stop screaming.
—Vince Aletti
