1 Anonymous Reality and Redemption in “The Family of Man”
The remedy for the kind of abstractness which befalls minds under the impact of science is experience—the experience of things in their concreteness. Whitehead was the first to see our situation in this light and to comment on it accordingly. He blames contemporary society for favoring the tendency toward abstract thinking and insists that we want concretion—want it in the double sense of the word: “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you still miss the radiance of the sunset. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.”
—Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
We begin with the representation of the human community as a family—that is, with Edward J. Steichen’s now infamous 1955 photographic exhibition “The Family of Man.” This exhibition belongs to the Cold War media of the mid-1950s. It circulated as an iconic statement of global unity at a pivotal moment in world history when the United States asserted its economic and political dominance through cinema and media. The exhibition’s success is tied to the use of photography as a connective and flexible tissue that enables a communicative network. The photographic and curatorial work of Steichen—his earlier wartime exhibitions as well as his work as a commercial photographer—helps us to consider the questions central to this book: Do we live in one world or many? How does the planetary come to figure in our understanding of the plurality of human communities? What is the role of photography in fostering a sense of the common world? This chapter seeks to understand how Steichen articulated a response to these questions through photography, and why over the past decade there have been so many rereadings of the exhibition that have been more nuanced than earlier interpretations which dismissed it as both naïve and imperialist.1
Held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, “The Family of Man” comprised 503 photographs from sixty-eight countries made by 273 photographers. The aim of the exhibition was to excavate the “essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”2 “The Family of Man” is considered to have been the most popular photographic exhibition in the history of the twentieth century. It featured photographs taken by professionals and amateurs alike that were selected on the basis of their ability to show aspects of the everyday around the world. The exhibition catalog was immediately distributed as an inexpensive paperback book (the initial run was 135,000 copies, which quickly sold out, and it became the best-selling photography book of all time—five million copies sold by 2000). Supported by the US State Department, the exhibition was seen by nine million people in sixty-nine countries in eighty-five separate exhibitions.3 Roland Barthes’s 1957 critique of the exhibition in Mythologies, which challenged its “sentimental humanism,” was thus decidedly against the popular grain. For Barthes, the photographs represented a “human essence” devoid of the weight of history, a humanism devoid of difference, “magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way.” For Barthes, the exhibition’s ahistoricism reinforces the old perils of classical humanism: “Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of the institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?), one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature.” Emmet Till, a young black teenager from Chicago, was brutally murdered in Mississippi by two white men for having whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in 1955. Till’s mother insisted on an open casket and the photograph of the young man’s mutilated body received international media coverage, and served to ignite the civil rights movement in the United States. Barthes does not dismiss humanism outright; instead, he suggests, “Progressive humanism … must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its ‘laws’ and its ‘limits’ in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical.”4
A similar response greeted the show when it opened in Moscow in 1959. Pravda published a review that ironically asked why the exhibition did not feature statistics on child mortality in Timbuktu and New York in order to foreground differences.5 Subsequent readings of the exhibition within the canons of photographic theory, by Susan Sontag and Allan Sekula, for example, framed its alleged sentimental humanism in terms of Cold War cultural imperialism and the US State Department’s global cultural offensive started during World War II. Sekula, writing in the early 1980s, singled out Carl Sandburg’s comments that “The Family of Man” featured a “multiplication table of living breathing human faces” as evidence of the way Steichen’s project sought a unifying biological essence that would efface cultural difference under the banner of freedom and would identify diversity in terms of a diversity of markets to be unified by an image of oneness. The cliché of photography as a universal language has served, Sekula underlines, to bolster the expansionist colonial project of the capitalist world order.6
While such criticisms are absolutely vital to any analysis, I have always been intrigued by the closing passages of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film which argue that “The Family of Man” foregrounds an emancipatory intercultural communication. According to Miriam Hansen, Kracauer’s postwar writings on film and photography resist any kind of “fetishistic wholeness, perfection, distance and control,” incorporating “the threat of annihilation, disintegration, and mortal fear into his film aesthetics—as a fundamental historical experience of modernity.” Kracauer’s cultural interpretations must be situated, Hansen submits, in terms of “life after the apocalypse.” It is in this sense that we can understand Kracauer’s reading of Steichen’s exhibition, which for Hansen represents a troubling turn away from history.7
For Kracauer, “The Family of Man” offers a future direction for the photographic medium: to make visible “the elementary things which men in general have in common.”8 This perspective might well have been due to the experience of the war shared by both Kracauer and Steichen. We see a fear of catastrophe reflected in the central image of Steichen’s exhibition—the eight-foot color transparency of an atomic mushroom explosion. It is the threat contained in this image, as well as its reality, that I would argue drove Steichen to conceive this exhibition of the human community as one family. Yet, of course, such an exhibition also reflected the new role of culture and of the United States in the world, and the selling of the American way of life as the explicit strategy of the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Cold War. Thus, the exhibition must be interpreted in terms of this contradiction between Steichen’s desire to foreground commonality in the face of possible nuclear warfare that would end human life on the planet and the US government’s new ideological war that was being waged with images.
Steichen’s War and Fashion Photography
During World War II, Steichen served in the US Navy, where he oversaw all combat photography, directed toward recruiting and chronicling the war. When he returned from service, Steichen was appointed director of the Department of Photography at MoMA in 1947—a newly created position. He was sixty-seven and had already organized two war exhibitions for MoMA, “Road to Victory” (1942) and “Power in the Pacific” (1945), both in collaboration with the US Navy. Though he came to the position with a great deal of experience, his hiring provoked controversy and several resignations. Beaumont Newhall, who had been the curator of the Department of Photography, resigned in protest at the appointment, along with the thirty members of the department’s advisory board. Steichen’s brand of populism, his reputation as a commercial photographer, and his curatorial approach to photography did not bode well for the future of photography as a fine art. Steichen’s first exhibition at MoMA, held in 1936 prior to his appointment, was the hugely popular display of hybrid delphiniums (these were the actual plants) from his collection; the results of his years as a horticulturalist and plant breeder were made public—such pure blue delphinium spires and new interspecies crosses had never been seen before. The audacity of this exhibition, which opened the museum to the materiality of the natural world and to audiences who did not go to museums, was a precursor of things to come.
Let me turn to Steichen’s relationship to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to more fully understand his populist approach as a curator at MoMA. The criticisms of “The Family of Man,”especially Sekula’s essay “The Traffic in Photographs” quoted above, have in the past skewed my engagement with Steichen’s exhibition, or least prevented me from taking it seriously. Sekula’s essay, like Barthes, situates the realism and the liberal humanism of the exhibition in the context of American Cold War propaganda efforts, and different versions of nineteenth-century positivism and physiognomic science. Yet here I want to argue that Steichen’s desire to communicate with a broad spectrum of people was fueled by a politics of the popular that photography was able to fulfill. His approach to photography, like Kracauer’s, is based on a complex understanding of photographic realism that is historically grounded in the experience of the spectator.
Steichen had met Stieglitz in 1900 and had been part of his inner circle of early art photographers, the Photo-Secession, an invitation-only group Stieglitz founded in 1902, which included Robert Demachy, Will Cadby, Gertrude Käsebier, Frank Eugene, J. Craig Annan, Clarence H. White, William Dyer, Eva Watson, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and R. Child Baley. Steichen helped Stieglitz design and found the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, also known as Gallery 291. A frequent visitor to Paris, Steichen was instrumental in bringing the work of Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, among others, from Paris to New York’s 291, creating an important (mostly one-way) bridge between modern art in the two cities.9 Steichen also participated in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (1903–1917); he designed the cover logo and typeface for the journal, and an entire issue was devoted to his photographs, including his experiments with color printing.
Steichen later recollected that “the great photographic event of 1907 was the Lumière Brothers’ introduction of color photography.” Indeed, Steichen was one of the first photographers in the United States to use (and even perfect) the Lumière Brothers’ autochrome plates.10 The process involved breaking the photograph down into separate images using potato starch particles that were infused with red-orange, green, and blue-violet dyes. The exposed double-coated glass plate was processed in reverse to create a color transparency that could be held up to the light or projected (printing proved to be too unstable), revealing a full-color image “as a mist of pointillist color specks.”11 As early as 1900, Steichen had experimented with Robert Demachy’s gum-bichromate, which gave him greater control over the development process by allowing him to coat the paper himself. The paper was coated with gum arabic and watercolor shades (brown, black, or almost any other shade); the light-sensitive agent was bichromate of potash, which was applied with a brush. This process attracted Steichen precisely because it broke down the divide between painting and photography. Such experiments with tone and color reinforced his commitment to pictorial experimentation in photography (and possibly fulfilled his early desire to be painter). Steichen expressed this formalist proclivity in the numerous experiments he carried out with color photography using selectively filtered, three-negative exposures, some of which were exhibited in 1906 at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, in a show called “Photographs by Eduard J. Steichen.” Steichen also hand-tinted each issue of the 1906 supplement of Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, which featured a photogravure of his photograph Road into the Valley—Moonrise.12
While the professional and personal friendship between Steichen and Stieglitz was fruitful for many years, the two parted ways over World War I. By Steichen’s account, each took a different view of the German situation during the war. Although raised in Milwaukee, Steichen was born in Luxembourg to a working-class family of committed socialists; as a result, he identified strongly with the French. For Steichen, “France had become another mother country to me, and I sided with her in all the arguments with Stieglitz.”13 Yet there were certainly also differences brewing between the two men over their interpretations of photography’s essential characteristics. While the relation between painting and photography (especially color photography and photochemical processes) was an ongoing source of creative exploration for Steichen, Stieglitz increasingly separated the two media as sign systems working at cross-purposes.14 Stieglitz dissolved both the Photo-Secession and the journal in 1917. The same year, Steichen joined the American Expeditionary Forces and helped to innovate aerial photography for the Army Signal Corps in northern France.
This encounter with the realities of war did not so much alter Steichen’s view of photography as a dynamic creative process as it increased his sensitivity to the power of photography to alter the world. His interest in the technical capabilities of photography was expanded by the “exacting science” of aerial photography, which was, he wrote, “completely different from the pictorial interest I had had as a boy in Milwaukee and as a young man in the Photo-Secession days.”15 The photographs of enemy territory, movements, and weapons storage provided information that helped to pinpoint targets to be killed. Suddenly, for Steichen, photography was not simply documenting aspects of war; rather, it directly, and devastatingly, participated as a weapon of war: “A state of depression remained with me for days, but gradually there came a feeling that, perhaps, in the field of art, there might be some way of making an affirmative contribution to life.”16 We can see in this first encounter with war the seeds of Steichen’s imagining of how photography and art could be directed toward ends different from simply gathering information. Later he would imagine that “if a real image of war could be photographed and presented to the world, it might make a contribution toward ending the spectre of war.”17
Steichen’s interest in photography’s technical potential had been intensified during the First World War and in the following years. After the war he returned to the farm he rented in Voulangis, on the outskirts of Paris, and for several years he carried out rigorous photographic experiments using the plants and flowers from his own garden. This turning toward the outside, toward nature, was inspired by the wartime problem of taking photographs “from a vibrating, speeding airplane ten to twenty thousand feet in the air.” It was also driven by a desire to find meaning in the external forms of the world, connections between plant life, humans, and built forms. Steichen was elated to find Theodore Andrea Cooke’s 1914 book The Curves of Life, Being an Account of Spiral Formations and Their Application to Growth in Nature. Cooke was trained as an art historian, yet his book represents an early example of interdisciplinary studies in visual culture, crossing zoology, botany, art history, and architecture to trace the existence and persistence of spirals in all parts of the physical (natural and cultural) world. Cooke was interested not in reducing the world to a law of spirals, but in the interconnectivities across worlds (natural and built); in the relation between art, science, and nature across many historical periods.
Between the First and Second World Wars, this extended study of nature and the built environment was interrupted by Steichen’s unprecedented financial and critical success as a commercial photographer in the United States. In 1923 he returned to the United States, opening a commercial studio in New York City. For the next fifteen years he shifted his focus from his earlier pictorialist and experimental work, concentrating his efforts on mainstream fashion and commercial photography. He created photographs for well-known American fashion magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue (both Condé Nast publications) as well as for advertising agencies such as the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company.
Steichen had a great deal of previous experience working in advertising design. He had apprenticed as a lithographer and, drawing upon an entire aesthetic idiom from the Beaux Arts, he had designed ads for magazines as early as 1899. Now he introduced a new aesthetic standard to fashion photography and celebrity portraiture, creating a distinctly modern style that would merge the two. He produced photographs of anonymous models in a manner that celebrated their individuality and distinct appearance—making stars out of unknowns and laying the foundation for some of the first “super models.”18 He also produced well-known portraits of celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Gloria Swanson. Yet what is distinctive in his photographs is not so much the faces (though these faces, whether famous or anonymous, were always glamorous) but the materiality of the photographs themselves—the sharpness of focus and lighting, the “objectness” of the objects and the sensuality of the settings.
Steichen came into the photo industry alongside the development of marketing as a science. Like most agencies of the period, the J. Walter Thompson Company employed a psychologist to head up the research department—in this instance, the behavioral psychologist John B. Watson. Trained at the University of Chicago, Watson drew on the simple stimulus-response model, believing that consumers were no different from rats.19 His basic premise was that three innate emotions—fear, rage, and love—drive all human behavior. Advertising could manipulate these emotions to set up conditioned responses by constructing images to stimulate and trigger people to buy products.20 While Steichen used two of these emotions—love and fear—extensively, his advertising work was far more nuanced than Watson’s functionalism allowed, no doubt owing to the influence of the European avant-garde art practices that he brought to his photography.
Magazines such as Life, Look, and National Geographic played a particularly important role in giving photography a more conspicuous function in information reporting, moving it from the background (that is, ads or simple illustrations) into the foreground of print media. Especially during World War II, photo essays and photojournalism was the mainstay of these magazines, made possible by advances in lightweight cameras such as the Leica, which could accommodate thirty-six exposures of 35mm film in each roll. In the November 23, 1936, issue of Life, the introduction “Life Begins,” which featured a photograph of a baby in motion by Margaret Bourke-White, stated the magazine’s mandate in purely visual terms: “to see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud …” This type of visual emphasis proved successful, and the circulation for all three of these magazines increased significantly.21
The Depression opened up a whole new dimension and role for social realist photography with the James Agee / Walker Evans project Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the lives of three southern families of sharecroppers, as well as the general photography project for the Farm Security Administration and the landmark exhibition of photographs at the New York train station. This exhibition tremendously impressed Steichen, who reviewed the show and in 1938 left advertising and his New York studio entirely, trading in his 8-by-10 studio camera for a small 35mm Contax, a “round the corner finder” which permitted taking pictures more discretely, and the newly available Kodachrome color film.
Most historians agree that it was not until World War II that photographers got into the business of actively and aggressively “covering” the war.22 While Steichen had produced aerial photographs for the military during the First World War, the Second World War brought him to the ground—more specifically, to water and air—as he had volunteered to create a photographic record of the war. He was assigned to cover naval aviation in the Pacific. Although he began working with a team of ten photographers, by 1945 he was director of the Navy Photographic Institute where he oversaw a stable of more than four thousand photographers. The institute’s goal was to create a photographic chronicle of the war and to provide a steady stream of information to be disseminated to the public. That remarkable expansion also represented a shift in the United States government’s budget toward producing the image of war and manufacturing propaganda. To be sure, many of the scenes of war photographed by Steichen and his team were staged, and they unquestionably portrayed a particular view of war. Yet for Steichen, the images of smaller gestures and the details of everyday life in the war zone were what would create an unprecedented archive of the war, and as he later recalled, emotional impact was the criterion by which images were judged. Steichen felt that such images would, paradoxically, lead to peace. While many of the institute’s images were broadly distributed, most were unauthored, and thus belonged to the American Navy. “Road to Victory” and “Power in the Pacific” were exhibitions of some of these photographs, whose objective was not only to express or instill patriotism but to create a true understanding of war. In the case of “Faces of Korea,” also known as “The Impact of War,” this understanding of war included some of the most graphic photographs from the Korean War. This last exhibition featured the work of David Douglas Duncan, whose book This Is War: A Photo-Narrative of the Korean War (1951) was, Steichen argued, “the most forceful indictment of war” and represented “the most realistic photographic interpretation of war ever put forward.”23
“The Family of Man”
Steichen believed that his war-related exhibitions (particularly “Faces of Korea”) failed because they simply made people sad rather than moving them to action. The affective framework for “The Family of Man” was to incite united action against war by creating an image of interrelatedness. Steichen found the inspiration for this idea in a biography on Abraham Lincoln written by Steichen’s brother-in-law and longtime collaborator, the socialist poet Carl Sandburg. The title for the exhibition was taken from a speech by Lincoln quoted in Sandburg’s four-volume set on the Civil War, called The War Years.24 As the introduction to the Family of Man catalog tells it, the exhibition was conceived as “a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”25
One definite precursor to the quotidian interests of “The Family of Man” was a series of photographic stories entitled “People Are People the World Over” that ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1948 to 1949. The photographic series was pitched to the magazine by the Magnum group, a Paris-based collective that retained the rights to their own photographs and included photographers Robert Capa, David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and Bill Vandivert. “People Are People the World Over” was a series of twelve two-page spreads about family life all over the world; many of the photographs were later included in “The Family of Man.”26 This project reflected an interest in cultures of the world and a conscious postwar and Cold War strategy to carefully educate the US population about the larger world, and the larger world about the United States. US high school curricula were redesigned to include anthropology, for example, and the Ladies’ Home Journal stories were marketed to schools for their educational value.27
“The Family of Man” took three years to produce, with Steichen and his assistant, photographer Wayne Miller, searching through more than two million photographs from individuals, artist’s collections, and archival files from magazines like Life and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Swiss photographer Robert Frank assisted Steichen with the research for the exhibition, and the two of them visited twenty-nine cities in eleven countries. They also solicited photographs from film societies, photo clubs, and magazines around the world. The final images selected for the exhibition were taken by 273 men and women, amateurs and professionals, famed and unknown alike. As the catalog recounts, the photographs were “made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on the daily relationships. … Photographs of lovers and marriage and child bearing, of the family unit with its joys, trials and tribulations.”28 Despite this claim to diversity, there is nevertheless a strong representation of photographs that were previously published in Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Fortune, and many of the contributors were from the Magnum group or were other well-established photographers (among them Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt). This is why the exhibition can, in some ways, be seen as a record of the documentary social realist trend in American photography that had started with the Depression.29 Though it claimed to be open to amateurs, the exhibition featured mostly professional photographers. Yet the idea the exhibition wanted to put forward was the accessibility of photography as a technology and the accessibility of the world through photographs. While no snapshots were included, Steichen wanted to convey the freedom and spontaneity of the snapshot in the unframed and floating photos.
Despite its informal feel, the exhibition design was rigorously implemented by the young architect Paul Rudolph (who had studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard) and was heavily informed by the Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer. Bayer had been a student of Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy at the Weimar Bauhaus, and had been appointed to teach in the newly created typography workshop. He designed his own unique typography, the Universal alphabet, a font that included only lowercase letters that would come to be strongly identified with the Bauhaus. During his time at the Bauhaus and after, Bayer was involved in developing a distinctive approach to exhibition design, which he treated as a metamedium.30 He would publish his ideas in 1939 in the essay “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design,” where he explained (using all lowercase type): “in exhibition design, we have a new and complex means of communication of the idea, in which elements, such as painting, photography, etc., fill only part of the field. the great possibilities of the exhibition design rest on the universal application of all known means of design: diagram, lettering, the word, photography, architecture, painting, sculpture, tone, light, film.” The exhibition, Bayer continues, is the culmination of “all powers of design.” The theme should be clearly expressed and should not “retain its distance from the spectator … it should be brought close to him, penetrate and leave an impression on him.” Exhibition design should “explain, demonstrate and even persuade and lead”; its influence “runs parallel with the psychology of advertising.”31 This psychology is not the behaviorism of John B. Watson that Steichen came to know in the United States but rather, as several scholars have speculated, the Gestalt psychology and pyschophysics that influenced faculty and students at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus.32 As is obvious from his essay and his approach to typeface, Bayer supported a universal theory of perception in which human physiology brings all of the different perceptual modalities together onto one plane.
Bayer’s essay encouraged designers to explore sensory experience: “by means of movement of the eye, of the head, or of the body, the field of vision is extended. it also becomes larger with increasing distance between the eye and the object. normal sight is horizontal. since, however, the perspective may be so greatly enlarged, there lies here an elementary motif of design” which is often not explored to its full potential. Bayer maintains that it is important to consider material in the exhibition design; new synthetic materials which have “enriched the store of media” serve as “structure and texture to the eye.” Other sensory experiences besides sight are suggested: “the sense of touch or smell are elements of the psychology of the effect. development and discipline of the feeling for the material were especially fostered at the Bauhaus,” he recalls.33 The exhibition design extends the visitor’s field of vision as well as other senses in a dynamic and stimulating environment. The final illustration in the article is an eyeball poised on top of a headless gentleman surrounded by a multiplicity of frames—site lines moving off in all directions.
In 1938, Bayer immigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States, the last of the Bauhaus designers to leave. He was invited to design the exhibition “Bauhaus: 1919–28” for MoMA along with its catalogue. He also designed two other exhibitions, “Arts in Therapy” (1941) with Monroe Wheeler and, through a close collaboration with Steichen, the unique war exhibition “Road to Victory” (1942), which would help to define Steichen’s distinctive approach to exhibiting photography. The design innovations that Bayer initiated, and that Steichen used to great effect, were a three-dimensional understanding of space and perception that constructed sculpted views out of overlapping photographs, as well as the use of transparent plastics, curved murals and walls, and other architectural features like railings and curtains to divide space in expressionist ways. Such techniques had been seen in Europe for nearly a decade, but had never been seen in a North American context before 1938.34 MoMA’s remarkable architectural features included its movable walls, which easily accommodated the large murals that Steichen had started to experiment with in his war exhibitions.
Figure 1.4 Installation view of the exhibition “Road to Victory,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 21 through October 4, 1942. Photo credit: The Museum of the City of New York / Art Resource, NY.
As with the war exhibitions, the photographs in “The Family of Man” were not framed but rather suspended from the ceiling; some were blown up into large murals and others were set in smaller clusters that were cinematic.35 Visual montage guided viewers through the exhibition and orchestrated their lines of vision. One of the key components in making such innovative exhibition spaces was the breaking up of symmetries and varying of image scales. (Recalling his work at MoMA, Bayer cites his teacher El Lissitzky as revolutionizing exhibition design by using montage techniques with photo enlargements.)36 With the help of his assistant Dorothy Norman, Steichen designed narrative chains that were connected to fragments of poetry and aphorisms from texts as diverse as the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, poetic reflections from the Sioux and Navajo communities, and African, Russian, and Maori folk tales, as well as from writers including Sophocles, Homer, Euripides, George Sand, Lao Tzu, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Saint-John Perse, Thomas Jefferson, Kakuzō Okakura, the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lillian Smith, John Masefield, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, and Bertrand Russell.
Steichen had imagined for the “Family of Man” exhibition a choreographed walk-through of a modernist space of overlapping, multiple views of black-and-white photographs. The walk was divided into simple “universal” themes: romantic love, marriage, childbirth, parenting, work, music making and joy, child’s play, education, sadness, hunger, old age, and worship that would lead toward one dramatic image. As the visitors glimpsed an image of a dead soldier, the theme and the quotations became more focused on war: “Who is the slayer, who is the victim? Speak” (Sophocles). Or “the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is quite likely to put an end to the human race … there will be universal death” (Russell). This focus on war culminated in a dramatic climax—a darkened room that housed one six-by-eight-foot glowing backlit color Milar transparency of a thermonuclear explosion. The image of the 1952 hydrogen explosion of test Mike, from Operation Ivy at Enewetak Atoll, was first published in Life magazine on May 3, 1954.37 After encountering this image in a darkened room, audiences would exit to find an image of the United Nations in session, a quotation from the 1948 Charter of the United Nations, and nearby a cluster of nine photographs of distressed faces.
While the exhibition was a popular success, criticisms of it were many. As noted earlier, many centered on the decontextualization of the photographs. Historian Christopher Phillips, for example, criticized Steichen’s thematic exhibitions for the decontextualization that comes with collage techniques, which he argued, had become the benchmark of Steichen’s ahistorical populist practices: “To prise photographs from their original contexts, to discard or alter their captions, to recrop their borders in the enforcement of a unitary meaning, to reprint them for dramatic impact, to redistribute them in a new narrative chain consistent with a predetermined thesis.”38 More recently, Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History (2002) points out that the exhibition attempted to create unity at a time when artists and activists around the world were using photography to express their differences. Describing the juxtaposition of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph Migrant Mother, which was produced as part of the Farm Security Administration photography program, with other images of unspecified calamities, she writes: “Images of workers from the Belgian Congo, Bolivia, Denmark, Germany, and the United States were thematically linked without regard for the drastically unequal circumstances of labor in those countries. Nathan Farbman’s photograph of an African Storyteller in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) becomes part of a cluster of images on education, twisting its meaning to relate it to Western educational practices.”39 Not only was this erasure of context an inherent part of the exhibition’s aesthetic, but it marshaled the different photographs to a Western (United Nations and United States) view of the world. In essence, she maintains, the exhibition could be read as an extension of American cultural imperialism.
In his essay “The Nuclear Family of Man” (2007), John O’Brian examines the way in which historically specific photographs, such as that of the lynching of a black man in Mississippi in 1937 or the devastating effects of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were either excised from the exhibition or never included. As Eric Sandeen reports, “Death Slump at Mississippi Lynching” (1937) was first included in the “Family of Man” but removed after the New York opening. According to Steichen’s assistant Wayne Miller, Steichen felt that the image was so violent that it became a “focal point” and stood out from the other photographs.40 Reflecting upon the different and productive subject positions that such a photograph could elicit, O’Brian also wonders why the extraordinary photographs of Matsushige Yoshito (the only photographs made the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima) were not included, or why Miller’s family photos were preferred over his series shot in Hiroshima in 1945, given the exhibition’s antinuclear message. While Steichen did include one photograph from Yosuke Yamahata’s 1952 book Atomized Nagasaki, of an injured child holding a rice ball with the identification simply “Nagasaki,” it floated in the cluster of nine portraits near the color transparency of the bomb, juxtaposed with anguished and concerned faces of other children, women, and men from Mexico, Africa, Poland, the United States, Indochina, Italy, Korea, and Austria. Arguably the historical specificity of the photograph is lost. Like Marien, O’Brian argues that
the overwhelmingly affirmative thrust of the exhibition smothered whatever potential may have existed for the representation of nuclear tragedy. His decision to represent the destructive power of the bomb in the form of a mushroom cloud and a single photograph by Yamahata, while rejecting other images of the destruction of human life and cities that occurred beneath the mushroom cloud … corresponded to the propaganda policies of the United States following August 6, 1945. The effects of radiation were consistently denied by official US sources.41
All of these criticisms remain a vital part of any consideration of Steichen’s efforts. But I would like to argue that the process of decontextualization was invigorated by juxtapositions and comparisons enabled by the exhibition design at MoMA, and by the selection of photographs which did depict, as Sandeen has recently pointed out, “unrest, mass turmoil and social injustice. Details of suffering, death and atrocity could be supplied by those able to place a grainy photograph into the context of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto or a little girl into the atomic landscape of Nagasaki.”42 While not a “world wide” exhibition expressing the “determining weight of history,” as Barthes surmised, it does produce, I would submit, a deeply historical version of humanism—a “progressive humanism” whose central articulation rests on one image of destruction through war and technology. Steichen’s exhibition at MoMA was not an empirical realist survey replete with rigorous sociological analysis—it was an activist exhibition staged at the very center of empire. As Sandeen puts it, Steichen’s “goal was to draw people into his world of photographs that asserted a common humanity, his antidote for the East–West militarism of the Cold War. He fought against the ambitions of empire through his one-world statement.”43 Indeed, as I explore below, this is expressly how Kracauer read the exhibition.
It is important to underscore that “The Family of Man” exhibition differed from the book in that the exhibition was based on fragments unified through the threat of global destruction, as represented by the photograph of the atomic explosion. The book did not contain this central image of the bomb. The exhibition had been designed with clusters of images that were intended to be read by a mobile spectator according to Bayer’s extended-field-of-vision methodology, bringing together different vistas, views, and associations. While Warhol’s silkscreens a decade later produced a most commodified and iconic version of the mushroom image of the bomb (Red Explosion, 1963), Steichen drew on the image before it had become cliché in order to produce the emotional culmination of the narrative—one that, like Warhol’s, commented on spectacularization, consumer culture, and even the banal beauty of such destruction. Unity is created paradoxically through the technology that slices through history and unites absolutely. Unity, here, is not simply essential and a priori but a deeply historical matter of necessity—the view of a shared planet produced precisely by a world that is not shared. Planetary thinking in the twenty-first-century context of climate change, as I explore in the final chapter, necessitates thinking about what globalized humanism looks like, about ecological interdependence and interconnectedness, just as antinuclear and a nascent environmental activism did in the postwar period.44
As noted, the color image of the atomic explosion is not reproduced in the book, which included only the black-and-white photographs. Moreover, it was not included in any of the traveling iterations of the exhibition, which included a black-and-white image of an atomic explosion (though in Japan this image was not included).45 The color image of the explosion seems to have disappeared and is not in the MoMA archives. Even the permanent home for the exhibition at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg (Steichen’s birthplace) does not include the original color image of the bomb—though there is a black-and-white photograph of an H-bomb in its place. One can see the original image, however, in a documentary photograph shot by Miller of his family looking at it, which was included in the deluxe version of the book.
Figure 1.8 Wayne Miller’s wife and children in front of a picture of the H-Bomb at the “Family of Man” exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 1955. The H-bomb photograph was provided by the US government and was the only color photograph in the exhibition. Photo credit: Wayne Miller / Magnum Photos.
The question of the bomb photograph is not the only reason that I want to suggest another way of seeing the exhibition. Clearly, the exhibition, in its multiplicity of emotional registers, used the techniques of manipulation that Steichen had always used—joy and sorrow placed within familiar narratives of necessity and social ritual in order to be widely accessible. Most of the photographs of everyday life featured the human face as an affective register. Yet I would argue, with Kracauer, that we can read “The Family of Man” as a collage that does not simply constitute a seamless whole or a reactionary decontextualization. Let me now turn to the “photographic approach” that underlies “The Family of Man” and its representation of the whole—as Sandburg put it: “one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.”46
Kracauer, Anonymous People
At the end of his classic history of nineteenth-century material culture, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion would state: “We have tried to assemble fragments of the anonymous history of our period. The searchlight has fallen on scattered facts and facets, leaving vast stretches of darkness between. The complexes of meaning thus arising have not been explicitly linked. In the mind of the active reader new interrelations and new complexes of meaning will be found.”47 Giedion developed the idea of “anonymous history” from the 1920s through the 1940s. In his first book, Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (1928), which influenced both Walter Benjamin and Kracauer, he described architectural form as “anonym” and “kollektiv.”48 Accordingly, this history of industrial architecture rests with the unnamed engineers and builders who shaped the nineteenth century.49
Building on the formalism of his teacher, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, Giedion sees that various trends of historical periods are connected. A history of patents and inventions is a history of creativity, which binds all disciplines together and ultimately influences even the most isolated elements of everyday life. Giedion’s insights had sources in the practices of the surrealists and of the Bauhaus designers for whom objects and things were embedded in and with the energies of historical forces. Through these objects, and through the networks that enabled an object to appear (there are hundreds of networks stored in the object—from the extraction of natural resources to the labor that produced the object; from ways of storing things to ways of moving them), Giedion maintains that one has access to life itself. He tells us: “the meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. These relations will vary with the shifting point of view, for like constellations of stars, they are ceaselessly in change. … History regarded as insight into the moving process of life, draws closer to biological phenomenon.”50 The concept of anonymous history is conceived as a dynamic nonanthropocentric, nonlinear cultural ecology. Giedion’s proposal for tracing the anonymous histories of inventions and ideas presents us with one of the first interdisciplinary methodologies for studying everyday material culture. He was committed to bridging the disciplinary boundaries between science, technology, and art as a means to engage with fragments of history as a living process of “new and manifold relations.”
This notion of anonymous history as a presentation of “manifold relations” (indeed, Giedion’s books are like world’s fairs or expositions in terms of their juxtapositions and comparisons) underpins both Kracauer’s film theory and Steichen’s curatorial approach. The introduction of photography into advertisements and the advent of color photography in the mid-1930s helped to consolidate what the young Weimar writer had called a “blizzard [Schneegestöber] of photographs.” In his 1927 essay “Photography,” Kracauer expressed his fear that this “mass of images” created by American magazines and emulated in other countries functioned to reduce the world, which had taken on a “photographic face,” to “the quintessence of the photographs.” The world “can be photographed because it strives to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots.”51 This snapshot continuum works against the memory image (the instance recollected through human cognition); and this world of disconnected fragments, this jumbled photographic archive, constitutes the aesthetic of modernity.
In Theory of Film, Kracauer significantly revises his earlier view that the industrialization of photography is a threat to human memory. Breaking down the opposition between human consciousness and the image, he reads photography as an antidote to the alienated life. Kracauer puts forward the notion that photography and cinema are able to communicate across cultures not by representing differences but by excavating similarities, commonness, and shared material reality. In the now infamous epilogue to this book, which he completed in exile in the United States during the postwar/Cold War period, Kracauer delineates the aesthetic vocation of film (whether depicted via photography or shown in the cinema) in terms of a new cross-cultural language of fragmentary moments. Trained as an architect, Kracauer is sensitive to the built environment and to the city’s relation to mechanical reproduction. This “photogenic” theme was an essential component of the early photography of Charles Marville, Stieglitz, and Eugène Atget. In his earlier writings on city culture and in Theory of Film especially, Kracauer frequently returns to “the street,” because the essential equation that underpins his photographic aesthetics is: film strip = the street = flow of life.52 As Miriam Hansen has observed, Kracauer creates a theory of film that eschews a “fetishistic wholeness, perfection, distance and control.”53 In his emphatic delineation of cinema’s capacity to capture the street with its “ever moving anonymous crowds,” its “indeterminate” shapes and patterns which “cancel each other out,” its infinite possibilities “eternally dissolving,” Kracauer has incorporated “the threat of annihilation, disintegration, and mortal fear into his film aesthetics—as a fundamental historical experience of modernity.”54 Kracauer’s interpretation of photographic ontology was developed during the war and in exile from his home in Germany and must be situated in terms of “film after Auschwitz.” In this way, the photographic medium provides a means to understand both the past and the present moment. As time passes, photographs lose their connection to individual memories and take on documentary and archival functions, revealing hidden aspects of the world; they become artifacts. Not only does the photograph reveal the details of physical reality, but over time, it is a document of worldly things: “things emerge [that viewers] would not have suspected in the original print—nor in reality itself, for that matter.”55 The photograph becomes a collective object of “discovery” and “exploration” that is imbued with the energies of the physical world, opening the world to a reading public.
Despite Kracauer’s belief in the “photographic approach,” he has no theory of verisimilitude. To Proust’s description of the photographer as “alienated consciousness,” “camera eye,” and “stranger” who stands opposed to the “unseeing lover” caught in the “vortex” of “incessant love” which is always a “mirror of the past,” Kracauer replies: “Actually, there is no mirror at all.”56 The photographer’s consciousness carries a carnal density, a storehouse of memories that like the “unseeing lover” structures reality similar to the way an empathetic reader studies and deciphers an elusive text. This “inner disposition” can be described in terms of “melancholy” and “self-estrangement,” whereby the dejected individual comes to identify with objects, losing herself in the configurations of environments. Kracauer’s materialist aesthetics will look to the photograph—the single shot—as the basis for the cinema’s ontology. The photographic medium has an inherent “affinity” for the ephemeral and “unstaged reality” which exists “independently from us.”57 As such, photographs have the ability to render “the fortuitous,” those “chance meetings, strange overlappings and fabulous coincidences.” Photography and cinema, according to Kracauer, offset the temporal and material abstraction imposed by the modern world of industrial capitalism. His lifetime preoccupation, as stated in his early Marseille notebooks, was the photograph’s capacity to convey “the process of materialization.”58 To Simmel’s famous formulation of the city as a lonely place, Kracauer adds the proposal that photography and film function to reestablish a sensuous contact between citizens and the world of things and surfaces. Like Benjamin, Kracauer sees the consumption of forms of mechanical reproduction as a way of responding to modernization rather than as an effect or even expression of it. This is why we can read Theory of Film as a theory of spectatorship in the twentieth century. Photography and cinema are the art of the urban: they reproduce the “susceptibility to the transient real-life phenomena,” and provide spectators with “the stuff of dreaming,” with a reality that “eludes measurement,” that is open and full of possibility. It is the anonymity of the setting rather than the staged story that is most important for the dreamer: “taxi cabs, buildings, passers-by, inanimate objects, faces … bar interiors; improvised gatherings” all hold “the opportunity of drama.”59 Thus, photography also has an affinity for the “endlessness” of the world, as the photograph invites us to “probe” and “explore” reality through it, which brings it close to science. This “endlessness” is unending precisely because photography and film will always be indeterminate, replete with a multiplicity of meanings and readings. This is different from a painting, whose meanings may well be multiple but can, to some extent, be ascertained through human intentions and circumstances. By contrast, a photograph “is bound to convey unshaped nature itself, nature in its inscrutability.”60 Kracauer’s approach to photography as a materialization which includes the human and the nonhuman, objects and environments, echoes Giedion’s idea of anonymous history, with which he was certainly familiar. His appreciation of the medium (which is no doubt prescriptive) is imbued with the plurality of the world in a way that seeks to shatter an anthropocentric worldview. According to Kracauer, film renders the world visible, it enables us to discover the material world and to apprehend the “psychophysical correspondences” materialized through film: “We literally redeem the world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera. And we are free to experience it because we are fragmentized.”61 The purely subjective image is, however, problematic: “the intrusion of Art into film thwarts the cinema’s intrinsic possibilities,” which are tied to its affinities to “actual physical reality.”62
This notion of anonymity was central to Steichen’s exhibitions “Road to Victory,” “Power in the Pacific,” “Faces of Korea,” and “The Family of Man.” The photographers he worked with in the Army and that he curated were largely uncredited; they were soldiers serving the country. So too those photographed who were part of the situations of war were left nameless. Steichen eschewed the high art of modernism and the low art of commercial photography in favor of what he thought photographers could do so well, which was to interpret the fleeting and minute aspects of everyday life. Although there were some extremely beautiful and now classic photographs in “The Family of Man,” no single photograph stands out from this collective work of art. The Lange photograph of the migrant mother was relegated to a corner in the exhibition precisely because Steichen knew that it would stand out from the other photographs. The exhibition concerns the collective and democratic nature of photography, and the aim of the exhibition was to create a space whereby beauty and masterpieces were secondary to the interpretations presented in the photographs and enabled by their juxtapositions.
Several aspects of this exhibition can be read as precursors to contemporary image culture and the globalization of images that Kracauer foresaw—a sense of the impermanence of the world, of radical incongruities that come with globalization: fragmentary narratives. While Steichen sought to find universal patterns in the photographs, they are not simply timeless. The exhibition “had an existence of its own” as any work of art would.63 It was specifically created to engage with a moment in time, after Steichen had experienced the atrocities and horrors of two wars. Yet this moment in time was not static but included mobility and movement in two respects: the mobility of the photographer and, as Bayer had described, the extended field of vision of the museum visitor.
As noted above, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank acted as Steichen’s curatorial assistant and accompanied him to Europe; he also contributed several photographs to the final exhibition. Like Steichen, Frank began his career as a commercial photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and was interested in precisely those aspects of daily living that would never make it into the museum or the glossy magazine. Against the spectacular image of fashion photography or photojournalism, he was drawn to the unfinished moment. Steichen had supported Frank in his application for a Guggenheim grant which he received in 1954, giving him time to drive his automobile across the United States taking photographs of Americans. The images Frank made on the road are filled with anonymous faces. Documentary photography on the road paradoxically singles out anonymous things from the flow of life to create identities through connected particularities.64 We can see here the development of strategies (those affinities described by Kracauer) based on coincidence, accident, indeterminacy, endlessness, and contingency; strategies taken up in experimental art and writing of the postwar period of a world in movement. These were expressly the aesthetic strategies that went into the exhibition design for “The Family of Man” created for the mobile spectator.
This was something that Steichen explored in 1952 in a series of group shows that juxtaposed five or six photographers under the rubric “Diogenes with a camera.” His objective was to present “a rich diversity of interpretation.” These exhibitions were based “in the desire to have photography collectively communicate a significant human experience.” As Steichen’s career as curator developed at MoMA, he began to understand how the exhibition gallery itself could bring another dimension to the mass media of photography, cinema, television, and print:
In the cinema and television, the image is revealed at a pace set by the director. In the exhibition gallery, the visitor sets his own pace. He can go forward and then retreat or hurry along according to his own impulse and mood as these are stimulated by the exhibition. In the creation of such an exhibition, resources are brought into play that are not available elsewhere. The contrast in scale of images, the shifting of focal points, the intriguing perspective of long- and short-range visibility with the images to come being glimpsed beyond the images at hand—all these permit the spectator an active participation that no other form of visual communication can give.65
We see here how Steichen’s curatorial insights were inspired by Bayer’s “fundamentals.” Thus the exhibition at MoMA, its performance, cannot be read separately from the event as staged. The performance itself included the spectator and was based on radical juxtapositions of images.
The anthropologist David MacDougall points out that it is not singularities but interconnectivities and flows between particular cultures that lead to deeply phenomenological and pedagogical gestures.66 “The Family of Man” gives us the interval or interface between places where identities and experiences acquire their meanings. Yet, as Kracauer theorizes, the exhibition is also characteristic of the “found story” in that it remains open and fragmented, burning through myths and clichés. It must resist the “self-contained whole” that would betray its force by casting a tight structure with a beginning, middle, and end around its anonymous core. The “found story,” Kracauer explains, arises out of and dissolves into the material environment, often in “embryonic” forms that reveal patterns of collectivity.67 It comes from the process aesthetic of the street, and it holds infinite possibilities for the psychic investment in the whole—in Steichen’s case, this is the whole family and the whole planet—even as it takes that whole apart. Fundamentally, Kracauer’s theory of film and Steichen’s MoMA exhibitions highlight spectatorship as an active process of apprehension.
While Kracauer is critical of the art film just as Steichen would be critical of the overly artful photograph, he nevertheless concurs with Alfred North Whitehead’s evaluation of the critical role played by “aesthetic apprehension,” emphasizing the “aesthetic character of experience.” As Whitehead explains: “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you still miss the radiance of the sunset. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.” Whitehead is interested in art as pedagogy, art as a training ground for sensory perception: “Art is a special example, what we want is to draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension.”68 The notion of radiance is important for Kracauer as it points not only to the outside, beyond human experience, but also to the processes of making visible—to photography and film, which are central to his thinking about redemption. Further, giving the example of a factory, Whitehead tells us that we need to understand the factory in all its complexity—“its machinery, its community of operatives, its social service to the general population, etc.”—in order to apprehend “such an organism in its completeness.” For Kracauer, this last term is not adequate: “In experiencing an object, we not only broaden our knowledge of its diverse qualities, but in a manner of speaking, incorporate it into us so that we grasp its being and its dynamics from within—a sort of blood transfusion, as it were.” As we will see in the next chapter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing similar phenomenological ideas around the interpenetration of the “flesh of the world,” and Kracauer, as we know from his bibliography (Cohen-Séat, Sève, Laffay, Morin, Callois, etc.), was reading French film theory and was involved with the Revue internationale de filmologie. Kracauer commented: “What we want, then, is to touch reality not only with the fingertips but to seize it and shake hands with it.”69
Redemption
If Kracauer’s film theory incorporates “a fundamental historical experience of modernity” into its central ontological claims, it also seeks to find redemption in this experience in and through film itself.70 For the cinema is not only an “eternally dissolving world”; it also offers a possible way forward out of that experience through the creation of a shared world. What these fragments of photographed moments portend is nothing more and nothing less than the “redemption of physical reality.”71 What does Kracauer mean by “redemption” in Theory of Film? He looks to his friend Erich Auerbach and his work Mimesis for illumination on this question. Auerbach’s work on literature locates redemption in “the moment” as something that is both historical and phenomenological: these moments concern not only the individuals depicted in them, but also “the elementary things which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life.”72 For Auerbach, who wrote Mimesis in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945 in response to a profound pessimism and relativism among German Jewish intellectuals, this commonality was a way of thinking about ethics and enabling judgment. He defines judgment as making oneself at home in a world without fixed points of reference, without universals, “in keeping with the constantly changing and expanding reality of modern life.”73 Kracauer contends, however, that Auerbach’s study of Western literature and realism fails to note that the task of rendering visible the “texture of everyday life” is most powerful in the photographic medium. It is not by accident, Kracauer writes, that the idea of “The Family of Man was conceived by a born photographer.”74 Until the twentieth century, no other period in history had had access to such a vast photographic archive of its past, Kracauer points out. These photographic cultures “virtually make the world our home.”75 Despite the accusations of naïve realism that greeted Kracauer’s book, he is not advocating the end of ideology or celebrating the end of history.76 Rather, like his friend Auerbach, he discerns in the “exploratory type of representation … that beneath the conflicts and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. … It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.”77
Kracauer gives special mention to Paul Rotha and Basil Wright’s film World without End (1953), a documentary sponsored by UNESCO that explores the similarities and differences between the people of Mexico and Thailand without conflating their different economic and social situations. World without End was presented at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1953 and was subsequently broadcast on British television to seven million viewers—a strategy to reach as many spectators in Britain as possible.78 To be sure, World without End can be read as a promotional film for UNESCO that reinforced rather than questioned the British Colonial Office; a film that clearly demarcated the victims from the caregivers (who worked for UN agencies).79 Yet Kracauer was interested in the utopian universality of cinema, its capacity to transcend linguistic differences.
At the end of Theory of Film, he turns to Satyajit Ray’s film Aparajito (1956) which perhaps best illustrates his point, a film that makes the everyday in Calcutta intelligible to viewers in “Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx.” Kracauer describes one scene from Ray’s film:
the camera focuses on the ornamental bark of an old tree and then slowly tilts down to the face of Apu’s sick mother who yearns for her son in the big city. In the distance a train is passing by. The mother walks heavily back to the house where she imagines she hears Apu shout “MA.” Is he returning to her? She gets up and looks into the empty night aglow with water reflections and dancing will-o’-the-wisps. India is in this episode but not only India.80
The final images are layered with realities that include emotion, dwelling, nature, and a tapestry of relations contained in the material circumstances of everyday life.
In the end, what is the substance of the redemption and indeed the kind of humanism that Kracauer locates in the documentary trend, which he predicted as cinema’s future? It is quite simply that photographic images open up their “anonymous state of reality,” an idea he credits to the young French film critic Lucien Sève. Kracauer cites Sève’s essay “Cinéma et méthode” which argues that the shot, as the fundamental element of film, reflects “the indeterminacy of natural objects.”81 Redemption is not only a space connected to the past; it is also potentiality. This is why Kracauer ends Theory of Film by looking to the relations between cultures, to film’s communicative capacity to connect things both human and nonhuman, and to open up new understandings. While Kracauer was unable to fulfill his impossible ambition—to explain the material complexity of film through one comprehensive theory—he had the great acuity to understand cinema in terms of communication and the creation of a public sphere of images, a common space that does not belong to any one subject. What he could not predict was the extent to which “the blizzard” of images that defined the visual culture of the 1940s and 1950s would implode into an entirely new apparatus of global interconnectivity and history—a multifaceted mass medium that would dematerialize, dissolve, and disintegrate audiovisual images beyond the frame, making their production and circulation more flexible, and at once more anonymous and more personal, while being subject to greater controls and surveillance.
“The Family of Man” emerged at precisely that point in the twentieth century where technological and economic globalization began to be visible. The critical scholarship about the exhibition reveals that Steichen was under pressure from both the government and from MoMA board president Nelson Rockefeller to be more accessible to amateur photographers, to the photo industry, and indeed to the world in order to create an image of the United States that was easily exportable.82 Certainly, as Sandeen has demonstrated, the exhibition was appropriated by the United States Information Agency (USIA), which was charged with “projecting American values abroad.” Steichen essentially lost control of the exhibition once it began to travel—more than 9,000,000 people visited it in over 100 locations around the world.83 “The Family of Man” is not one exhibition but many different exhibitions and iterations around the world, with very different exhibition contexts and related geopolitical negotiations. In his most recent study of it, Sandeen looks at the Cold War terrain that greeted the exhibition in postrevolutionary Guatemala in 1955 under the control of US imperial interests.84 Indeed, away from its original location at MoMA, the organic aspects of the exhibition were transformed by the different temporal, geographical, political, and cultural registers defined by US foreign policy, of which Steichen had very little understanding. Such contexts often challenged what he assumed to be “the universally understood meanings” of the photographs and the “immutable message” of the exhibiton.85 Herein lies the difference between Steichen and Kracauer. There is little doubt that Kracauer’s theory of spectatorship and phenomenological understanding of images would have recognized the difficulties inherent in such a massive undertaking.
