4 ‘The Camera Will Not Miss
Anything’ (1955)
The Family of Man at the Städtische Galerie
The exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries, which, in the Federal Republic, can be seen only in Munich, selected from 10,000 images of masters and amateurs and compiled on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art in New York by an old man, the 73-year-old photographer Edward Steichen, who has, with this collection, created the most beautiful monument to himself and to his faith in mankind – this show is extraordinary. It is a comédie humaine, written by the photographic lens, a human comedy of our time and it is both drama and tragedy, exactly as it was with Balzac, and even contes drolatiques are not missing. Mankind, all of us in our world of vanquished distances and unconquered discord, we, all of us, whether white-, black- or yellow-skinned, are captured here by the camera, from birth to death, in our happiness and our suffering, our work, our joys and our crimes. In some of these images we are the crown of creation, in others we cover this earth as though with leprosy. Photography does not hide anything. It will not miss anything. It captures on film or plate the surface of our being, but at times, and that happens in the pictures in this exhibition, it x-rays us and magically captures our souls. It succeeds in doing what only a great artist has the gift to do, catching the moment and making it eternal. No image in this collection is posed, and thus we see real life here and not any wishful euphoria, no contented homunculus without fear, without hunger, without greed, the way progressive and reactionary governments alike love man as their subject.
The eye of the camera here resembles the poet’s gaze, and the photographs in this exhibition also are irrefutable proof of the truthfulness and the correct direction of contemporary literature, because a lens that sees only what is there contradicts by what it captures the attacks against the modern novel, as they have recently been made by Life magazine and everywhere in Germany, the accusation that fiction represents the world too gloomily and thus is untrue. All images of the show, even the gayest, even the friendly flute-playing Peruvian shepherd boy on the cover of the catalogue, are faces of melancholy. They are that because they are true, because they have reached, through an originally technical process, the truth of all art. In any laugh there is mourning. Seeing that now is not saddening, as a widespread misconception has it; this truth of life and its representation in art only strengthen and elevate the senses. Only a laugh that lacked any grief would be depressing because it would be completely inhumane. There is a picture of a little boy. He is nice. He is charming. He looks at his dog, a young fox terrier on a rope. It is an idyll on a stone staircase. And yet it is the melancholy that makes the image lively, that makes it human, that touches us. The melancholy here is in the face of the dog. He is too serious, the little dog, but it is only this ounce of bitterness that turns this photograph into a document of existence and makes it unique. Conversely, it is only in the stern face of the judge who is leafing thoughtfully through the legal code, in his deep sad eyes that have looked into the abyss, that the surprising, but clearly perceptible possibility of joy creates the beauty of the picture.
There are also images of inhumanity. They are breathtaking. There is a woman sitting at the roulette table. But she is no longer a woman. She is a specter. She is a ghost of gambling and greed. There are the hands of a worker. She assembles bolts. She probably gets paid on a piece basis. Her hands have become inhuman in their agility, the gripping tools of a robot on whom the rudiment of human features seems particularly sinister. There are young people. Their passion is toward death. They happily race toward it in a car they deliberately ride without holding the steering wheel. Then there is the dark panel of a tragedy, the work of an unknown German photographer: Jews are being deported from the burning Warsaw Ghetto toward annihilation. The Jews, children among them, are the human beings in the picture. They preserve man’s dignity, or else the sight that deeply shocks would be unbearable. For in the front of the photograph stands the monster. He likes to do what he does. He feels in his uniform. He holds his pistol at the ready. If there is a hell – he is its son.
Some images are indiscrete in what they observe. The image of birth, the child still connected by the umbilical cord with the mother; the intimacy of lovers, probably seen through a telephoto lens; the pain of relatives at the open cardboard coffin of a Spanish boy. But it is an indiscretion that previously only the poet permitted himself who created the image of man out of himself, and it is legitimate because it is true.
The exhibition has much to teach. It teaches pride. Pride in human beauty, wisdom, goodness, decency, and labour. It teaches humility. Humility at human limitations, human poverty and suffering. Above all, the photographs teach fraternity. The improbably spruced up socialite mother from Vogue is the sister of the Negro mom in blue jeans, stretched out with her child on the bare ground. Not only the world but also man is indivisible. In this photographic exhibition we are looking at a mirror. We recognize ourselves. We are not alone, and each one of us is there for, is responsible for, everyone else, just as the Bible already put it with the question: ‘Cain, where is thy brother Abel?’
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 November 1955, p. 276
[Translated by Werner Sollors.]