Family of Man
Family of Man exhibition, a collection of 503 photographs assembled by the curator of photography at MoMA, New York, Edward Steichen, assisted by the photographer Wayne Miller and Steichen's brother-in-law, the poet Carl Sandburg. All were black-and-white except one, an outsize transparency of an H-bomb test. The exhibition opened at MoMA in January 1955 and subsequently toured widely abroad, including to Moscow in 1959, under the auspices of the US Information Agency. It was conceived, in Steichen's words, ‘as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world’. However, although the 273 photographers represented included distinguished foreigners—among them Boubat, Brandt, Álvarez Bravo, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Ronis, and Sander—most were Americans, and/or members of American agencies or, especially, contributors to Life magazine. Some critics, particularly in Europe, viewed the exhibition as Cold War propaganda and a projection of American values in thinly universalistic disguise. Certain items, such as W. Eugene Smith's photograph of children in a wood, now seem cloying. The only nude adults depicted were non-Westerners. But not all the exhibits were upbeat or sentimental, and there were pictures of poverty and conflict, including a searing image of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto revolt.
The exhibition was a significant event in the cultural history of the 1950s, and in American cultural diplomacy. It also marked a further stage in the museumization of photography, though paradoxically just as television was replacing the still photograph as the world's most pervasive visual medium.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Sandeen, E. J., Picturing an Exhibition: ‘The Family of Man’ and 1950s America (1995)
