JTF (just the facts): A total of 65 black-and-white photographs, framed in white/unmatted and hung against light beige walls or mounted between sheets of plexiglas and displayed on pedestals. Includes a display of reproductions of the backs of many of the photographs.

The following works are included in the show:

• Photographer Unknown, (Wright Brothers’ first flight), gelatin silver print, 1903/no later than 1933, sized roughly 8×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Wright Brothers’ glider), gelatin silver print, 1908, sized roughly 7×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Henry Ford in his first car), gelatin silver print, 1910/1914, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Mrs. Lloyd George), gelatin silver print, c1913/early, sized roughly 6×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Soldiers in World War I), gelatin silver print, 1914-1918/no later than 1956, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Leon Trotsky), gelatin silver print, 1920, sized roughly 6×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (OPEC), gelatin silver print, 1923, sized roughly 7×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (“Jersey” Ringel), gelatin silver print, 1921, sized roughly 8×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (“Monkey Trial”), gelatin silver print, 1925, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Babe Ruth), gelatin silver print, c1925/no later than 1953, sized roughly 8×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Babe Ruth), gelatin silver print, 1927/1928, sized roughly 7×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Amelia Earhart), gelatin silver print, 1928, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Charles Lindbergh), gelatin silver print, 1927/no later than 1953, sized roughly 10×8 inches
• Tom Howard, (Ruth Snyder executed in electric chair), gelatin silver print, 1928/1950s, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Mickey Mouse balloon), gelatin silver print, 1934, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, gelatin silver print, 1936/1970s, sized roughly 10×13 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Hindenburg disaster), gelatin silver print, 1936/c1950, sized roughly 8×12 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Sigmund Freud), gelatin silver print, 1938/no later than 1955, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Pearl Harbor), gelatin silver print, 1941/no later than 1945, sized roughly 4×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Supplies on Normandy post D-Day), gelatin silver print, 1944, sized roughly 10×13 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Adolf Hitler), gelatin silver print, 1944, sized roughly 8×9 inches
• W. Eugene Smith, Saipan, gelatin silver print, 1944, sized roughly 8×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Big Three at Yalta), gelatin silver print, 1945, sized roughly 6×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Liberation of Dachau), gelatin silver print, 1945, sized roughly 6×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (First atomic explosion near Los Alamos), gelatin silver print, 1945/1956, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Henry A. Scheafer, Emblem of Victory, gelatin silver print, 1945/1950s, sized roughly 8×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Atom bomb text at Bikini), gelatin silver print, 1946, sized roughly 13×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Gandhi), gelatin silver print, 1946, sized roughly 10×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (International Business Machines), gelatin silver print, 1951, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Roger Bannister), gelatin silver print, 1954, sized roughly 10×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Rosa Parks), gelatin silver print, 1955, sized roughly 9×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Student follows Elisabeth Eckford), gelatin silver print, 1957, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Elisabeth Eckford denied admittance), gelatin silver print, 1957, sized roughly 6×9 inches
• Charles Moore, (Martin Luther King Jr. arrested), gelatin silver print, 1958, sized roughly 8×7 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (The Beatles and Muhammad Ali), gelatin silver print, 1964, sized roughly 6×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Clay Hopper welcoming Jackie Robinson), gelatin silver print, 1947, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Eddie Adams, (Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong fighter), gelatin silver print, 1968/1969, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• George Tames, The Loneliest Job, gelatin silver print, 1961/1962, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Paul Schutzer, Berlin Boarders, gelatin silver print, 1961/1970s, sized roughly 9×13 inches
• Yasushi Nagao, Assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, gelatin silver print, 1960, sized roughly 8×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Glenn in orbit), gelatin silver print, 1962, sized roughly 9×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Ku Klux Klan), gelatin silver print, 1962, sized roughly 8×12 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (President Kennedy speaking on television), gelatin silver print, 1962, sized roughly 10×8 inches
• Charles Moore, Birmingham, Alabama, gelatin silver print, 1963/1970s, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Charles Moore, Birmingham, Alabama, gelatin silver print, 1963/1969, sized roughly 6×10 inches
• Malcolm Browne, The Ultimate Protest, gelatin silver print, 1963, sized roughly 9×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Martin Luther King Jr.), gelatin silver print, 1963/1972, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (March on Washington), gelatin silver print, 1963, sized roughly 7×9 inches
• Cecil Stoughton, (Lyndon Baines Johnston after being sworn in as President), gelatin silver print, 1963/1964, sized roughly 10×14 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Widow kisses casket), gelatin silver print, 1963, sized roughly 9×12 inches
• Robert H. Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald shot by Jack Ruby, gelatin silver print, 1963/1966, sized roughly 9×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Newark riots), gelatin silver print, 1967, sized roughly 8×12 inches
• Jack Thornell, James H. Meredith shot during Civil Rights March, gelatin silver print, 1966, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Jack Thornell, James H. Meredith shot during Civil Rights March, gelatin silver print, 1966, sized roughly 6×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassination), gelatin silver print, 1968, sized roughly 6×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (John Lennon and his bride of five days Yoko Ono), gelatin silver print, 1969, sized roughly 9×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Joe Cocker at Woodstock), gelatin silver print, 1969, sized roughly 8×12 inches
• John Filo, Mary Ann Vecchio knelt over the body of a slain student at Kent State University, gelatin silver print, 1970/1976, sized roughly 9×9 inches
• Jack Manning, Students demonstrate in Wall Street against US involvement in Cambodia, gelatin silver print, 1970, sized roughly 8×12 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Women’s liberation demonstration), gelatin silver print, 1970, sized roughly 5×12 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Muhammad Ali), gelatin silver print, 1971, sized roughly 9×6 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Nixon meets Mao), gelatin silver print, 1972, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Huỳnh Công Út, Naked Vietnamese child fleeing a napalm attack, gelatin silver print, 1972/1973, sized roughly 7×8 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Munich massacre at 1972 Olympic games), gelatin silver print, 1972, sized roughly 6×10 inches
• Photographer Unknown, (Patricia Hearst), gelatin silver print, 1974, sized roughly 9×7 inches

(Installation and detail shots below.)

Comments/Context: One of the perhaps unexpected downstream outcomes of the transition to digital photographic technology several decades ago was the eventual death of the so-called “press print”. Back in the days when newspapers and magazines were laid out by hand, the photographs that were to be included in a given issue were circulated physically as prints, moving from the photographer (or photo agency, or whoever was responsible for the image in the first place) to the files of the news organization, and ultimately into the layouts themselves, and then back again into the files for future use. These press prints were essentially created for reproduction purposes and typically had original credit stamps on the back, providing the relevant information about who was to be credited in the associated image captioning.

Over the passing decades, many news organizations built up substantial archives of the press prints they had acquired and used in their stories. And these prints weren’t ever treated with the reverence and connoisseurship we now apply to vintage photographic prints. In fact, press prints were routinely marked up with crop lines and grease pencil edging, and more often than not, they were stamped on the back each time they were used in print, often with additional hand written notes and annotations. So for particularly famous images, that were run again and again many times over the years, the backs of these prints became crowded with inscribed history, each mark telling its own story about how that image had traveled through the cultural fabric of time.

Of course, large news organizations have now become entirely digitized, and in many cases, they have similarly completed the painstaking work of digitizing most if not all of the images in their historical archives, thereby making the original press prints effectively obsolete. And in a perfect example of the old adage that one person’s trash in another person’s treasure, as the press prints were being discarded or de-accessioned, there was a fleeting opportunity for someone to scoop up all these historical artifacts before they were lost. And that’s exactly what the collector Dan Solomon and gallery owner Howard Greenberg set out to do, ultimately chasing down archival press prints from The New York Times, Time-Life, The San Francisco Examiner, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and others. Over some twenty years, the pair assembled a cache of nearly 250 now-iconic press prints, made by photographers known and unknown; this show offers an edited sampler of what they were able to acquire and save, providing an engaging window into nearly a century of American history.

The prints on view are organized chronologically in a rough circle around the gallery space, starting with the first flight of the Wright brothers in 1903 and ending with Patty Hearst toting a machine gun in 1974. And since the backs of these prints are often just as interesting as the fronts, the exhibit smartly makes many visible, a few in double sided frames on pedestals, and many more in reproductions arranged into a dense cloud on one wall. The result is a show that feels richly filled with physical presence, the hands of now invisible newspaper men and women all over these famous prints.

Indelible moments of war and diplomacy provide the framework for the this collection, with World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II (including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, Hitler, Yalta, the liberation of Dachau, and the atomic bomb tests), and the Vietnam War all making notable appearances. Protests and riots are similarly well represented, some of which turn tragically violent, in images of Gandhi, Rosa Parks on the bus, the Little Rock Nine attempting to go to school, Martin Luther King Jr. arrested (and later speaking at the March on Washington), the Birmingham water cannons, the self-immolating Buddhist monk, the Newark riots, and the shootings in Jackson, MI, and at Kent State University. Assassinations and deaths are also a poignant part of this swirl of events, via images of the funeral of John F. Kennedy, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.

Much of the rest of the collection is more culture and celebrity driven, with famous faces matched by milestone events. Famous firsts come in the form of Henry Ford in his first car, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh in front of his plane, an early IBM computer, Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile record, and John Glenn in orbit, with other well known faces like Babe Ruth, Sigmund Freud, the Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and John Lennon all making appearances.

For many of these photographs (including three Pulitzer Prize winners), the images have become so broadly circulated that they now have a historical force all their own – they are the moments we all “remember” or the ones we think of as touchstones of the times. When this cultural ubiquity is then paired with the unmatched provenance of the countless stamps and marks on the backs of these prints, the combination becomes a nearly unmatched historical resource, one that likely belongs in institutional hands where it can be preserved, protected, and displayed adequately.

In the meantime, this show provides a rare glimpse of the mechanism that has shaped our sense of shared historical memory. In a world where we take immediate image circulation for granted, these press prints are evidence of a slower moving, more human process that was once used to create the stories of our lives. That time has now passed, making these prints artifacts of the past. If you are old enough to have been alive when some of these events occurred, this show likely has a familiarly nostalgic time capsule feel; and if they all happened decades before your birth, then these same pictures likely have the same puzzlingly quaint relevance as a rotary phone or a fax machine. Either way, the photographs are a fascinating and thought-provoking slice of visual history, reminding us of a not-so-distant time when a physical print was still the way an image was circulated.

Collector’s POV: These photographs are looking for an institutional/museum home as a single collection, so no prices were readily available for individual works.