The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age

On 26 January 1955, after much anticipatory news coverage, an unusual exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Widely debated, Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man became extraordinarily popular, and its close to 500 photographs have been seen by around 10 million visitors at 100 or so sites worldwide. In his multi-year selection and planning process, Steichen had the help of photographer Wayne Miller; photographer, editor and advocate for social causes Dorothy Norman, who was close to Alfred Stieglitz but had never worked with Steichen before; poet Carl Sandburg, who was Steichen’s brother-in-law; Walter-Gropius-trained architect Paul Rudolph; and Dutch avant-gardist painter Leo Lionni, who, some months after the opening, created an adaptation of the exhibition that served as catalogue and sold 5 million copies.

The fact that the show was offered free of admission at some places cannot account for its popularity, nor can support from the United States Information Agency (which was not even two years old at the time of the opening at the MoMA) explain the successes at Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Torino, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow, Seoul and Tokyo. I saw the exhibition as a teenager in 1958 in Frankfurt, where, in cooperation with the Amerika-Haus, it was held in the Haus des Deutschen Kunsthandwerks, the building where art publishers exhibited during the Frankfurt Book Fair (see illustration 68). I shall include memories of that visit and review a few photographs and features of The Family of Man more closely (both exhibition and book) against the background of reactions these images have received, while also thinking a bit more generally about the exhibition. I do not retread the familiar debates generated by Roland Barthes, Jacques Barzun, Hilton Kramer, Dwight MacDonald and Susan Sontag, debates that led to dismissals of The Family of Man as Cold War American middlebrow popular culture.

An abridged leaflet-sized excerpt from the book of the exhibition with the original cover image seemed cool and jazzy to me, with its bold strokes of colours, clear design and the striking photograph of the flute player at the centre, whose eyes seemed to follow you (see illustration 16). Latin American flute players having not yet flooded European cities, the cover image suggested freshness, and I kept this mini-catalogue in modernist company in a party basement, with jazz posters, a Matisse print, a wind-up gramophone with a 78 record of Dizzy Gillespie’s Thermodynamics and a few complimentary early issues of the photo journal Magnum. I was thus surprised that a recent critic saw in ‘Lionni’s abstract design’ a ‘programmatic adherence to earthly and racial boundaries […] as if the world were one continuous continental landmass, and each race its own nation, stepping forth into the global marketplace of neocolonialism’.² This critic did not comment on the photograph that ultimately was to appear and remain at the centre of the colourful abstract design, Eugene V. Harris’s figure of the Peruvian piper and his companion that had first appeared in Popular Photography.

According to Steichen’s own explanation, ‘the gay Pan-like Peruvian boy playing the flute’ expressed ‘a little trace of mischief, but much sweetness – that’s the song of life’.³⁴ The New York Times called the figure ‘a cheerful young piper’, and for Monique Berlier the ‘photograph of a merry Peruvian flutist’ conveyed an ‘optimistic mood’.⁵ The Berlin Tagesspiegel criticized the show with its ‘photo of a Peruvian shepherd’s boy playing the flute’, for it ‘represents something that lacks truth, namely that life consisted only of sweetness, of eternal youth, and of lovely and friendly melodies’.⁶ When Peru’s ambassador Fernando Berckemeyer visited the exhibition in Washington he admired ‘the photograph of a Peruvian Indian tootling a primitive flute’.⁷ The German modernist novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, whose novels Pigeon in the Grass, The Hothouse and Death in Rome and travelogue Journey to America have been translated into English and whose first post-war book was an account of a Jewish survivor that he edited, saw something else altogether when he visited the show in Munich in 1955:

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.⁸

The African American science fiction writer Samuel Delaney offered a different, more detailed reading:

The exhibit’s colophonic image was a closeup photographic portrait of a young Peruvian Indian – under the slouch hat and the embroidered cap beneath it, boy or girl, it’s unclear to most Americans – playing a flute and looking slyly at the viewer, while a more distant, similarly dressed youngster in the background gazes joyously at the sky, as if apprehending the answering music of the Universe.⁹

Looking closely at the photograph, Delaney called attention to the sexual ambiguity of the flute player, as if addressing criticism of the show for what is now called heteronormativity.

The flutist’s face appeared on exhibition posters, publicity materials and catalogue covers. In a 1955 USIA documentary, Steichen starts his tour in front of the flute player. The image also was displayed ‘about 25’ different times in the original exhibition and reappeared five times in the book of the exhibition.¹⁰ Though it is present only once in the permanent Family of Man installation at Schlass Klierf (or château de Clervaux), a UNESCO Memory of the World site, it is reproduced by the roadside as one approaches Clervaux. Viewers thus kept encountering, and readers soon viewed, this portrait as ‘a familiar face’ among so many new faces.

It was furthermore an image placed next to several different aphorisms. When appearing, in the exhibition book, between photographs of a Japanese wedding ceremony (by Werner Bischof) and of a Czech marriage procession (by Robert Capa), accompanied by the Pueblo Indian saying, ‘We shall be one person’, the flute player may appear like a Cupid figure who brings lovers together (all the time looking enigmatically or whimsically at us) (FoM 14–15). The Czech wedding procession includes musicians, and the Peruvian enhances the presence of music here and throughout, functioning, as Katherine Hoffman wrote, like ‘a musical leitmotif, helping to hold the exhibit together, and pointing to the role of music as a significant expressive universal language’.¹¹ Tellingly, the flute player does not appear in sequences on labour, suffering, or war.

Steichen wished The Family of Man to be understood in musical terms. He explained that ‘This was not constructed as an exhibition. This was constructed like a piece of music, a sequence of movements – soft, violent – then ending up with joyousness.’¹² In his unsurpassed study, Eric Sandeen examined the musical–visual connection in the planning of the exhibition:

This photograph of a Peruvian flute player was to be displayed at several stations in the exhibition. Miller placed […] prints […] wherever they seemed to fit. A caption from the exhibition, attributed to Plato, expressed the proper sentiment: ‘Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.’ […] As Miller remembers, some discussion had been made about wiring the exhibition space for recorded music, but the idea had been abandoned as distracting. Nevertheless, including another celebratory art form had appealed to the organizers.¹³

The photography show thus drew on ‘another universal, nonverbal language’ and found in the image of the flute player ‘the missing accompaniment for the exhibition’.¹⁴

The placement of the photograph next to Bischof’s shot of a Japanese wedding may carry additional significance, for Eugene Harris had brought Miller and Steichen the news of Bischof’s death. Bischof and Harris ‘had been photographing in Peru when Bischof died in an automobile accident. Harris brought with him some of his own work from South America, including the photograph of the flute player.’¹⁵ Bischof’s death could also add an undertone of mourning to the image, providing a reason for the melancholy Koeppen sensed in the Peruvian photograph.

Delaney, after outlining various themes of The Family of Man, similarly stated that ‘the arrangement was musical, rather than directly didactic – which surely contributed to the exhibit’s popularity’.¹⁶ This distinguished the show from Weimar political exhibitions and didactic installations of the interwar period. Rob Kroes extended further the visual–musical link: ‘If Steichen’s hopes for the universal language and appeal of photographs resembled the appeal of music, the two media were merged in the image of a Peruvian flute player […] his inviting eyes leading viewers along like a pied piper.’¹⁷

Pan-like, cheery, a pied piper with a little trace of mischief, but much sweetness, an embodiment of eternal youth, of the spirit of music, of lovely and friendly melodies, substituting for the missing musical accompaniment, yet also androgynous, looking slyly, or with inviting eyes, or seeming melancholy and perhaps serving as a reminder of Bischof’s death – the key image of the Peruvian flute player is a close-up portrait of a subject who is also looking at us and seems to make us wonder about its contexts. None is given, for withholding contexts is programmatic in The Family of Man. Thus different moods can be read into the face, the other figure in the back, or the image as a whole. Since repetition creates familiarity, the feeling that we may still not really ‘know’ this face, yet begin to find it familiar, may also create some uneasiness, and perhaps that is why, in a well-researched survey of visitors to the Munich show, there was some grumbling that ‘some pictures, the flute player, for instance, appear too often’.¹⁸

The repetition of the same image may create the effect of a musical leitmotif, but it also underlines Walter Benjamin’s notion of the photograph’s technological reproducibility and suggests the loss of the aura of an individual work of art. It was as if Steichen wilfully wanted to separate The Family of Man’s version of photography from any competition with painting or with art photography by stressing its pliability to be multiplied (ten versions of the entire exhibit were ultimately in existence) as well as by letting the photographs be enlarged, cropped and even spliced into each other, printed without borders on cheap paper and mounted, unmatted, without frames and unprotected by glass, on Lucite boards suspended from ceilings, giving Paul Rudolph at MoMA and designers at all subsequent shows, including Natalie Jacoby’s installation at Clervaux, ‘a real engineering task’.¹⁹ Wayne Miller explained their procedure:

[W]e were dealing with concepts of communication that depended upon size, juxtapositions, and sequences. Some of the photographs were quite large – ceiling to floor. The largest one was of Mt. Williamson by Ansel Adams. It was about 10 feet high and 12 feet wide. We used an English paper that came in 40-inch-wide rolls. We had to make it in four panels, and it was quite a trick to match the quality of each panel.²⁰

I remember being surprised by the unusually suspended, different-sized prints at the exhibition I saw in Frankfurt and, researching that exhibition’s background now, I learned that, even though it reused materials from an earlier Miró show, the installation costs were significant.²¹

That only photographs were shown must have shocked those visitors who expected a MoMA show to include paintings. This is illustrated by an episode Hilton Kramer reports of a ‘stubborn lady’ who ‘demanded her admission refunded on the grounds that no paintings were on view’.²² Aline Saarinen, reviewing The Family of Man in a piece tellingly entitled ‘The Camera versus the Artist’, drew a sharp distinction between painting and photography: ‘But photography is the marvelous, anonymous folk-art of our time.’²³ She may have echoed Steichen, who had encouraged amateur submissions and included some of their photography and who was quoted as saying at the Washington, DC, opening, ‘If you photograph the things around you – the things you know and understand – you will open the door for a universal folk art, the greatest the world has seen, where everyone becomes an artist.’²⁴ Saarinen’s attempt to separate painting from photography went further:

A painting, however realistic, is always an abstraction. A photograph, no matter how abstract, is always basically actual. The painter starts with an empty canvas and creates an image seen or imagined. The photographer starts with the finished image and creates by selectivity.²⁵

This drew the ire of Ben Shahn, a socially engaged painter who had also worked as Farm Security Administration photographer alongside Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans (one of Shahn’s FSA photographs was included in The Family of Man). Responding to Saarinen in the New York Times, Shahn wrote, ‘On behalf of the photographer I would take issue with the term “folk-art.” Photography is a very highly developed art and keenly sophisticated. Both qualities are just the opposite of the earnest awkwardness and simplicity of folk-art.’ Shahn proposed that ‘painting is able to call much more out of the artist himself, and is able to contain a fuller expression of the artist’s own capacities than is photography’. However, as if to stress that he was not criticizing Steichen through Saarinen, Shahn mentioned ‘the magnificent photographic exhibition arranged by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art and called The Family of Man’.²⁶

Steichen’s collaborator and aphorism-co-provider Norman was clear about what distinguished Steichen’s approach from painting as well as from art photography in the Stieglitz tradition:

Stieglitz […] consistently opposed the practice of permitting anyone else to make one’s prints for one […] [H]e objected increasingly to the use of artificial light, as to any and all enlargements – especially to ‘insensitive’ enlarging paper. He believed in contact printing, as in attempting to obtain the most supreme print quality possible […] He rebelled against exhibitions, as against photographs themselves, based on literary ideas; against what he called ‘sporadic’ undertakings of any kind […] He disapproved of reproductions not created with the utmost consideration for the ‘sense of touch’ of the originals from which they were made […] And, as for the practice of making one’s prints for reproduction only, this was virtually inconceivable to him.²⁷

Norman summarized that ‘almost everything to which Stieglitz most objected was done in one form or another in connection with the Family of Man exhibit’. Indeed, Steichen went so far as to mount two life-sized photographs, Kosti Ruohomoa’s older couple on a swing (see illustration 17) and Brassaï’s young couple kissing while on a swing boat, on two sides of a panel that, swing-like, could be moved back and forth. In a USIA film, Steichen himself sets the panel in motion.²⁸ The sequence of children from around the world playing ring-around-the-rosy was itself mounted on a carousel. The pregnancy-and-childbirth unit was placed in an installation reminiscent of an obstetrics ward. Steichen and Miller also included a mirror in a series of close-ups on faces, thus literalizing the metaphor they had offered for the show, conceived, as Steichen wrote, ‘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’.²⁹ They removed the mirror after two weeks, because it seemed ‘corny and wrong’.³⁰

Except for the general aphorisms, photographs were presented without captions, dates or names of the artists; the book of the exhibition identified images by name of country, photographer and venue in which the photograph had previously appeared, but also gave no titles, dates or other details. In the exit interviews of the Munich audience, 7% complained about ‘inappropriate captions and too meager text’ and asked for names of photographers and even for cameras used, lens openings and exposures.³¹ Ironically, by violating the rules of art photography, Steichen made museums and the broader public more receptive to it. In 1959, when the Family of Man was still circulating, MoMA opened a room devoted to photography. The article reporting it referred back to Steichen’s show.³²

Withholding contextual information intensifies the concentrated gaze at each image itself (rather than at identifying signage). The cover image of the flutist gave us a first sense that ‘cold’ readings of a single image may diverge from each other, perhaps more than those of fully identified photographs. Uncertainty also makes the viewer search for substitute contexts elsewhere – and in The Family of Man, that elsewhere is in other images and their arrangement in ‘sequences’.

Entering the exhibition or opening the book of the exhibition, the first image after the Peruvian musician is Pat English’s monumental photograph of a crowd in England (see illustration 35). English transforms the huge image of the crowd effectively into wallpaper-like material that Steichen had pasted on the portal through which one entered the exhibition, the ‘entrance arch’. It also appears as backdrop to D. A. Pennebaker’s 1959 documentary of the Moscow show, Opening an Exhibition.³³ It is in front of this image that Steichen signed a copy of the exhibition book for then Vice President Richard Nixon; a publicity photograph outlined the Peruvian ambassador against English’s British crowd.³⁴ Lionni adapted English’s photograph as decorative end papers of the book, a sea of faces looking toward the left of the viewer and forming a rug-like design when one squints or steps back.³⁵ Were they looking for Queen Elizabeth at her 1953 coronation? Even though one can make out some people who appear to be looking at us when we zoom in on the photograph, its primary function seems to be to highlight the difference between photographic portraits and photographic backdrops. This is neatly captured in the co-presence of flute player and English crowd. By the way, I did not remember the English crowd photograph at all, even though it was so prominently displayed at the exhibition.

However, I do remember another crowd photograph very vividly, Andreas Feininger’s telephoto view of Fifth Avenue, which was blown up to such a large format that one could easily see the numbered street signs, the flattened cars, partly obscured in the side streets, and the faces of a whole number of pedestrians on the upside-down V-shaped, 15-people-wide sidewalk (FoM 142 and 204) (see illustration 18). Its original caption in Life magazine was ‘Anonymity in a Fifth Avenue Crowd’, yet I remember this image as holding a kind of cosmopolitan promise of the intensity of a really crowded metropolis, and the one-way arrows, even the parking prohibitions, seemed attractively exotic from the point of view of Frankfurt, where traffic was still light. Had I seen the photograph’s original caption, I might have been prompted to perceive it differently – or to forget it. (I thus experienced the advantage of captionlessness.) Leafing through the book of the exhibition now, I noticed the rhythmic recurrence of crowd photographs, with the Paris opera by Walter Sanders, Edmund Bert Gerard’s American indoor meeting and Maria Bordy’s UN General Assembly (FoM 100, 175, and 184–5). Framed by the endpapers (or the exhibition’s entrance arch), crowd scenes surround all other images.

18 The Family of Man installation at Clervaux Castle. Theme ‘Relationships’: Andreas Feininger.

The close-up and the crowd scene are also features of film language, according to Siegfried Kracauer, for they are among the truly ‘cinematic’ qualities that distinguish film from what he dismissively calls ‘canned theatre’.³⁶ Norman noted that The Family of Man was ‘more related to the motion picture tradition than to that of Stieglitz – Steichen having functioned as a kind of director’.³⁷ Is the sequence of images for the visitor of The Family of Man like that for the viewer of film montage? Lev Kuleshov undertook the famous experiment of cutting a close-up of a man’s face, first against a bowl of soup, then against a dead girl in a coffin, and finally, against a woman reclining on a divan: and in the first case, viewers perceived the man’s face expressing hunger, in the second, mourning, and in the third, happiness.³⁸ Has the form of The Family of Man followed a filmic grammar and forced viewers, by withholding historical and authorial information and guiding them through a montage of images, to read pictures in sequence, as in a film? There is a storyline that takes the viewer from natural grandeur, sexual love, marriage, birth, motherhood, childhood, family peace, family struggle, fatherhood, family as institution, work, play, music, dance, scholarship, science, old age, death, loneliness, mourning, suffering, art, law, group communication and politics to violence, then back to young love and ending with children.³⁹ The path through the exhibition could thus mark the viewer’s passive reception of that narrative line, with a big arrow propelling them through the ‘thematic tunnel’ of the show.⁴⁰

Perhaps on the most crowded days – Washington’s Birthday 1955 at the MoMA, or pretty much any day at the Moscow showing – visitor flow was regulated this way. But as Fred Turner has stressed, using the floor plan published in Popular Photography in 1955, viewers had many different options of traversing the exhibition once they had passed the birth room and before they reached the eight-foot-tall colour transparency of the atomic explosion, the ‘single image that every viewer had to confront before moving on’.⁴¹ The fear of atomic annihilation was a sensation Steichen did want to convey, even heavy-handedly, but otherwise, as Turner writes, ‘each image offered a viewer a potential moment of identification’ and the ensemble of images by which the viewers were surrounded on all sides encouraged them

[…] to rearrange [them] within their own psyches. In the process of aggregating and organizing these images, visitors could, at least in theory, engage in a degree of self-formation not open to citizens of authoritarian regimes. Most important, they could emerge from this process as psychologically whole and self-directing.⁴²

It was as if Steichen left Kuleshov’s different montage options available to viewers who could arrange them in many different sequences, and Bayer’s notion of the surround view strengthened this feature.⁴³

Some reviewers indicate how they recombined and respliced images against each other, and imagined other changes to the arrangement. Rolf Seeliger, for example, wanted more didacticism: he found that the show tells viewers, ‘All of you […] this is what you are like!’ But Seeliger would have found it better if the admonition had been, ‘All of you […] you must change so that things will be different!’⁴⁴ In order to achieve that, Seeliger proposed that there should be more contrastive groupings, for example the Chinese boy with the bowl and the Diane Arbus photograph of father and son reading the newspaper; or the dead soldier next to the UN plenary meeting; or the shocking photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto next to the carnival party; and Anne Frank’s belief in human goodness should be complemented by the information that she died after suffering terribly in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Turner is right in suggesting that viewers had many choices of looking at single photographs in isolation, of following the offer of the groupings Steichen made, or of making altogether new combinations and contrasts.

All black-and-white photographs were ultimately spliced against the vast colour slide representing the threat of total destruction. (This may be one source for Koeppen’s melancholy readings.) Fred Turner concludes that revisiting this varied, free and anti-authoritarian exhibition with its hope for tolerance and peace, permits viewers today ‘to glimpse a holistic, individualistic, utopian vision that would animate the countercultural outbursts to come’.⁴⁵ I remember leaving the exhibition and talking with my parents about the threat of nuclear war, and I want to remember that I saw the photograph of an atomic explosion. When I now look at the book of the exhibition, which contains the image of the atomic explosion only in one of Wayne Miller’s ‘photographic footnotes’ (an imaginative new genre!), I am no longer sure whether the conversation about the bomb had supplied a cover memory.

One image rarely commented on is Clemens Kalischer’s photograph of a young boy with a dog on a stoop. Koeppen found that in this ‘idyll on a stone staircase’ it is ‘the face of the dog’ that makes it melancholy. ‘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.’ Koeppen’s view of Dan Wiener’s portrait of a judge is similarly melancholy: ‘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’. By contrast, the Polish poet Witold Wirpsza strikes a formalist note, his protest against reading photographs in thematic sequences rather than as single works, and he focuses on the V and W shapes he notices in the judge’s face, hands, and law book.

The majority of furrows on his face; symmetrically; they’re arranged

In an inverted V; from the eyes, from the nose, from the mouth. The hands, too; symmetrically; in the letter

V, uninverted (on open volumes of codices, i.e., on

Very broadly stretched V’s). Attorney? Prosecutor?

Judge? Toga: lawyer. A concerned (exhausted?) actor. Acting,

In the old parlance: comedia (intending no

Offence) is recorded in the little black flecks

In the horizontal furrows of his forehead (from heavy lifting; symmetrically;

The eyebrows). But in comedia (how else to save mankind from

Evil? The punishment ennobles the society, does it not? Everything

Depends upon the crumpled little aluminum idol of interpretation, right,

Friend?), and so, in comedia (several times repeating

The word: comedia), so in comedia he fades, he melts away;

Without symmetry; concern; then only an exhausting (formerly

In parentheses) remains: this gerund is not spelled

With a ‘V.’

At his neck the photograph shows a very

Busy tie.⁴⁶

In another brief reading of the photograph of the factory woman’s hands, taken by the Albanian American Gjon Mili, Koeppen comments, ‘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’ (FoM 78). Mili was represented with several photographs and was among the more experimental artists in the exhibition, working early on with an electronic flash that he could set off in rapid repetition, thus creating single- and multiple-exposure ‘stroboscopic’ photographs (FoM C 101, 104, 189).⁴⁷

When Koeppen looked at Miller’s ‘image of birth, the child still connected by the umbilical cord with the mother’, he praised it for being ‘indiscreet’ in what it observes: ‘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.’⁴⁸

It is another photograph that I vividly remember. In 1958, pregnancies were secretive affairs and seeing a child being born was simply a cultural impossibility. I had seen fetuses in formaldehyde jars in Frankfurt’s natural history museum, but Miller’s photograph was an unveiling for me as a teenager. The newborn being lifted up diagonally, reflecting the photographer’s flashlight, the enormous umbilical cord, the doctor’s shiny rubber gloves and the mother’s (or nurse’s?) gloved hands reaching out for the child – the fabric of bed sheet and doctor’s coat, mask and head covering forming the background for most of the photograph – made me share a private, perhaps tabooed, world in a dramatic, fleeting moment. (I am wondering now, whether apart from my idiosyncratic reaction to Feininger’s Fifth Avenue, my memory apparatus follows Steichen’s script in that I think I recall best the flute player, childbirth and nuclear explosion photographs.) Learning that Wayne Miller, the father of David, the child being born, photographed his own wife, and that the child’s grandfather oversaw the delivery, gave the image new familial contexts.⁴⁹ Miller (who was like an adopted son to Steichen) included his family lavishly, for example in that photographic footnote in front of the atomic mushroom cloud: Family of – the artists’ own families? This sense of family is strengthened by a photograph of Steichen’s own mother – probably the only one that is dated – spliced, in the exhibition book, into a decorative image of a wheat field.

At the centre of the exhibition were the ‘Family of Man central theme pictures’, globally conceived sequences on labour, eating, singing, dancing, drinking, playing, learning, thinking and teaching. Here was perhaps the heart of intuitively sensing human sameness despite all the differences. And here viewers had many choices, as Turner stressed, in facing the many images that surrounded them in a carefully constructed three-dimensional environment:

In a single glance, viewers could take in a Japanese farm family in traditional dress, a polygamous African family outside their hut, two images of rural Italian farm families, and a multigenerational, white American family, posed around a woodstove, with portraits of nineteenth-century ancestors on the wall behind them. Seen individually, these images could be read as stereotypical depictions of ‘primitive’ Africans, ‘tradition-bound’ Japanese and Italians, and ‘hillbilly’ Americans. But seen together, as they were meant to be, the images challenged stereotypes. Far from privileging either whites or Americans, the photographs in fact equated them with two groups suffering extraordinary prejudice in America at that moment – Africans (and, implicitly, African Americans) and our former enemies, the Japanese – and with our other former enemies, the Italians […]

Moreover, viewers encountered those images at eye level, overhead, and well below the waist. They were in fact surrounded by the families of the globe.⁵⁰

Unlike in film, they could linger at some images and hurry by others. And readers and reviewers have taken both routes.

Let us follow Turner then, linger a bit at the ‘learning’ sequence and examine a photographic pair in the exhibition’s book, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of the Czech auditorium and the neighbouring image from Bechuanaland by (Pat English’s husband) Nat Farbman (see illustration 19). (The exhibit’s arrangement was different: the photographs were not right next to each other and displayed in different sizes (FoM 120–1).) Samuel Delaney literally moved into these two pages with a lecture-long exegesis, questioning the implicit claim that, like their format, ‘on some level, the contents of the two pictures are also identical’, as they represent education. His reading takes him to a series of binary opposites (night–day, naked–clothed, listening–taking notes, camera looking down–looking up, etc.). These opposites suggest a development from left to right, but then Delaney also reads it from right to left, and concludes that The Family of Man is ‘not a reproduction of the world’ but ‘a work of art’.⁵¹ Here is an extract from Delaney’s iconographic approach to Eisenstaedt:

19 The Family of Man installation at Clervaux Castle. Theme ‘Learning, thinking and teaching’: (from left to right) Nat Farbman, J. De Pietro (John Philips), Ruth Orkin and Roman Vishniac.

The right-hand photograph […] shows a deeply raked, stadium-style lecture hall, suggesting a European university, in which we see, from slightly off center, ten rows of alert, university-aged young people (with another row of standees crowded at the back, bulging down into the single aisle visible at the far right of the photo). A high, undraped window, even further to the right, lets in the daylight that suffuses the faces of the fifteen-to-twenty odd students nearest. But these are only a fraction of the hundred or more we see in their barely curved rows throughout the well-lit lecture hall. All give their attention – or busily take notes, textbooks and notebooks open before them – to an unseen speaker, somewhere in the lecture well, outside the frame, somewhere off to the lower right […] All the students appear to be white. The young men wear jackets and ties. The young women are, for the most part, neatly attired. Four of them, by my count, wear hats. Several overcoats hang forward over the lowest curved row of desks, as if the young folks have hurried to the lecture on a winter’s day. The lowest figure in the right-hand corner, a woman, leans back, somewhat uncharacteristically. She wears a man’s white shirt over a dark T-shirt and a wristwatch. Her arms too are folded beneath her breasts, putting her in pointed dialogue with the young African woman in the other picture – sophisticated Western bohemian skepticism (today most American students would read it as ‘dykey’) vs. smiling, if joking, native approval (in her innocent nudity, surely the young African woman is heterosexual, or at least innocently polymorphous; as are the two male adolescents).⁵²

Reading this image (as he read the flute player) in terms of disturbing the charge of heteronormativity, Delaney misreads the girls’ outerwear (which looks like a raincoat over a dark pullover to me) and misses the politics of a medical school classroom in Czechoslovakia recently turned Communist, with so many female students.

The Warsaw Ghetto photograph hit a particularly raw nerve in Germany in the 1950s⁵³ (see illustrations 16, 33). (I have seen it so many times in the meantime that I am not sure now whether I remember it from The Family of Man.) It gets mentioned by all German reviews I found and provoked adverse reactions in the survey for its ‘presentation of Germans in an unfavorable light’. One respondent wrote, ‘There was one feature of the exhibition which I didn’t like. That is, that they showed a picture of Warsaw, of Jewish inhabitants and of armed members of the SS, while refraining from showing atrocities committed by other nations.’⁵⁴ This photograph and that of the ‘a-bomb explosion’ were the two images least liked by 7 to 8% of the people surveyed.

Max Horkheimer, who gave the opening remarks at the Frankfurt exhibition, only hints at the Warsaw photograph when he states that ‘what does seem to defy any identification at all is that which is completely and utterly evil, of which there are at least two instances in the exhibition. This kind of evil arouses indignation.’ (May one assume that the other instance was the photograph of the hydrogen bomb?) Wolfgang Koeppen accounts for this image more fully as the embodiment of the lowest rung of hell, as part of what he calls ‘images of inhumanity’:

[T]here 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 view 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.

Yet the inclusion of this photograph, which inspired this reading and upset some viewers in Germany, seemed hypocritical to some critics who deplored the absences of true atrocity photographs from the Time-Life archives.⁵⁵ The Warsaw photograph, which spoke to many without contextualization, is actually one about which quite a bit of context is known – though the German photographer who took it remains unknown. It comes from the Stroop Report, a grim parody of the family photo album. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives identified some of the subjects, Yehudit Neyer (born Tolub), her mother-in-law, her daughter and her father, Avraham Neyer (the only one to survive).⁵⁶ The SS man on the right, whom Koeppen saw as the inhabitant of hell, has not been identified, though the SD trooper pictured in the more famous Stroop Report photograph that shows a little boy with his hands up was SS-Rottenführer Josef Bloesche. Polish authorities identified and found him, using this photograph; he was tried by a Polish court in 1969, sentenced to death and executed in July of that year.⁵⁷ Does this context change what we see in the photograph?

As Monica Bravo put it, ‘If nothing else, Steichen won for […] photography a mass audience.’⁵⁸ Since The Family of Man was most likely also the first photographic exhibition I visited, I can say that I was, and am, among that mass – though I don’t remember any crowds at the exhibit. In fact, despite a vast and costly advertising campaign that included all Frankfurt movie theatres, the show I saw, running from 25 October to 29 November 1958, attracted a far lower than expected number of visitors, forcing the Kuratorium Kulturelles Frankfurt to cover a substantial deficit.⁵⁹

The progressive aspects of The Family of Man are impressive. It has long been known that its intellectual ancestry goes back to Bauhaus displays and political exhibitions of the interwar period whose didactic approach Steichen modified; that it drew on, and included, FSA photography; that Wayne Miller began his career with a project on the Negro in Chicago that connected him with sociologist Horace Cayton and that he worked for Ebony magazine; that black photographers Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava were included; and that Native American texts and images were also much in evidence. Gerd Hurm has traced the feminist origins of Steichen’s project back to the Declaration of Sentiments. Katharina Fackler, arguing against John Szarkowski, has shown that The Family of Man influenced the photography for the ‘War on Poverty’ of the Johnson administration.⁶⁰ Though the report that Walter Ulbricht was intrigued by The Family of Man does nothing for its progressive credentials, it does suggest that the exhibition transcended Cold War East–West boundaries.⁶¹ The fact that Bertolt Brecht visited the show at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin on 7 October 1955 is more noteworthy (see illustration 4).⁶² Part of a progressive and multi-ethnic American tradition, then, The Family of Man popularized photography as a social medium. I felt encouraged by the show in my teenage pacifist modernist leanings and in my wish for global understanding and greater social equality.

Reviewing The Family of Man’s reception more broadly for this chapter, I found it encouraging to read Ben Shahn calling the exhibition ‘magnificent’ and found myself in agreement with Max Horkheimer’s assessment that The Family of Man ‘sides with human beings yet at the same time does not absolve them of guilt; it inspires tolerance of weakness, but not of barbarism’.⁶³ Horkheimer was happy to be invited to give the opening remarks in Frankfurt to the show that he already knew well at the time.⁶⁴ I particularly liked Horkheimer’s term ‘Selbigkeit’ in his remarks, referring to the discovery of ‘identity’ in the sense of sameness across social divides:

However manifold the objects and figures depicted may be, however different the ages, genders, nations, tribes, people and objects, it is precisely in this great variety and individuality, in which the smallest difference is crucial, that the viewer experiences his identity [Selbigkeit].⁶⁵

Seeing the photographs, like perceiving all things properly, has its mimetic elements. But that has its limits – not for reasons of cultural relativism but of ethics – Horkheimer writes:

In this exhibition our mimetic powers seem to desert us when we have to identify with what is radically evil, although there is no doubt that it exists. While the viewer may develop an understanding for what is quite alien to him, certainly for the person in the dock, for the pariah or for a boisterous or frivolous individual, he simply cannot identify with the person whose aim is to cause fear and terror. And this only proves that, however great the suggestive powers of these pictures, however much they may stimulate feelings of identification, the exhibition nevertheless insists on the consciousness of the freedom and the responsibility of the individual.⁶⁶

Kracauer, near the end of his Theory of Film, also invokes Mimesis, Erich Auerbach’s in his case, who observed that the random moments of life represented by the modern novel concern ‘the elementary things which men in general have in common’ and suggested that ‘the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened […] It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.’ And here Kracauer thinks of photography as the ideal medium for this task:

Auerbach might have added that the task of rendering visible mankind on its way toward this goal is reserved for the photographic media; they alone are in a position to record the material aspects of common daily life in many places. It is not by coincidence that the idea of The Family of Man was conceived by a born photographer. And one reason for the world-wide response to Edward Steichen’s exhibition must be laid precisely to the fact that it consists of photographs – images bound to authenticate the reality of the vision they feature.⁶⁷

The contemporary German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch recognized the utopianism of the show when he expressed his belief that the transcultural age might, with its mixing of patterns of culture, bring along a reduction of cultural differences: ‘Perhaps we will, in the age of transculturality,’ Welsch wrote, ‘truly come closer to the old dream of a “Family of Man.”’⁶⁸ Wolfgang Koeppen’s summary view may serve as conclusion:

The exhibition has much to teach. It teaches pride. Pride in human beauty, wisdom, goodness, decency, and labor. 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 photography exhibition we look 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?’⁶⁹

1 I thank Gerd Hurm and Shamoon Zamir for inviting me, and Anke Reitz, Jean Back, Bob Krieps, and Odile Simon, Universität Trier, NYUAD, and the Centre national de l’audiovisuel for their support of this project. Helpful archivists include Claudia Schüßler at the Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt, Dr Ursula Keitz at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, Philip Koch at the Wolfgang-Koeppen-Archiv Greifswald, and Judith Cohen, Director of Photographic Services at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2 Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 23.

3 Judith Crist, ‘Modern Museum to Show “Family of Man” Photos’, New York Herald Tribune, 23 January 1955, 24.

4 A journalist in Photo-Presse described the photograph’s effect: ‘Zwischen all dem Ernsten und Heiteren tönt unaufhörlich die Ewige Melodie des Lebens. Der Strom des Lebens fließt weiter, unbekümmert um Einzelschicksale.’ H. Starke, ‘Das Menschenleben in 503 Photos’, Photo-Presse 10, no. 43 (1955): 4, quoted in Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Verleugnete Bilder, The Family of Man und die Shoa’, in The Family of Man 1955–2001, ed. Jean Back and Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jona-Verlag, 2004), 92.

5 Jacob Deschin, ‘“Family of Man”: Panoramic Show Opens at Modern Museum’, New York Times, 30 January 1955, X17; Monique Berlier, ‘The Family of Man: Readings of an Exhibition’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 215.

6 Cited in ‘Visitors’ Reactions to the “Family of Man” Exhibit’, Report No. 225, Series 2 ([Bonn]: Research Staff, Office of Public Affairs, American Embassy, 23 January 1956): 82. Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt.

7 Ruth Shumaker, ‘It’s a Wonderful One World, Steichen and Guests Agree at Exhibit’, Washington Post, 1 July 1955, 59.

8 Wolfgang Koeppen, ‘Der Kamera entgeht nichts’, clipping from Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 November 1955, 276, Wolfgang Koeppen Archiv Greifswald M56 (my translation).

9 Samuel R. Delaney and Matthew Cheney, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), ‘Appendix A: Midcentury’, 204.

10 Judith Crist, New York Herald Tribune, 23 January 1955, 24; Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Maco Publishing and the Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 8, 15, 37, 97, 187. Hereafter the book of the exhibition is cited in the text as ‘FoM’.

11 Katherine Hoffman, ‘Sowing the Seeds / Setting the Stage: Steichen, Stieglitz, and The Family of Man’, History of Photography 29, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 321.

13 Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 45. The Plato quotation may have been made up, perhaps by Dorothy Norman.

17 Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2007), 118–19. See also Hoffman, ‘Sowing the Seeds’, 321: ‘Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition may be viewed as a Gesamtkunstwerk as it incorporated literary and poetic elements, drama, visual arts and dance motifs. For example, the Peruvian flute player, a photograph taken by Eugene Harris and published in Popular Photography, was repeated several times in the exhibition and was the cover image for the catalogue […] It may be viewed as a musical leitmotif, helping to hold the exhibit together, and pointing to the role of music as a significant expressive universal language. The accompanying caption for one of the piper images, from St.-John Perse, stated: “Music and rhythm find their swing, sweetness, to the last palpitation of the evening and the breeze”! Four pages later, music is evoked again, in a quotation from Plato: “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.”’

19 ‘Assembly of Steichen Art Exhibit Provides Real Engineering Task’, Washington Post, 17 June 1955, 22.

20 Wayne Miller, ‘World War II and the Family of Man’, in Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, 2nd edn, ed. Ken Light (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010), 51.

21 Kuratorium Kulturelles Frankfurt (KKF) V 96 / 54: letter to Fa. Peter & Schauss, 8 October 1958. Interestingly, in a memorandum of a 18 September 1958 meeting, architect Rolf Volhard summarized that this already quite pathos-laden and sentimental show should not be intensified with additional effects in presentation. Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt.

22 Hilton Kramer, ‘Exhibiting the Family of Man: “The World’s Most Talked about Photographs”’, Commentary 20, no. 4 (October 1955): 364.

23 Aline B. Saarinen, ‘The Camera versus the Artist’, New York Times, 6 February 1955, X10; also reprinted in ‘The Controversial Family of Man’, Aperture 3, no. 1 (1955): 7.

26 Ben Shahn, ‘Art versus the Camera’ (Letter), New York Times, 13 February 1955, 123.

27 Dorothy Norman, in ‘The Controversial Family of Man’, special section of Aperture 3, no. 1 (1955): 12.

30 Fred Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America’, Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 80.

32 ‘Museum Plans a Gallery for Photography’, New York Times, 22 November 1959, X19.

34 ‘Portfolio’, 357; Eric J. Sandeen, ‘The International Reception of The Family of Man’, History of Photography 29, no. 4 (2005): 348, shows that Berckemeyer was also somewhat awkwardly placed right in front of Nina Leen’s large picture of a multigenerational American family. This was part of Steichen’s strategy of assembling photographs of people looking at Family of Man images, or as Steichen put it, ‘people in the audience looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.’ Quoted in Kevin Salemme, ‘Chasing Shadows: Steichen’s Dream of the Universal’, History of Photography 29, no. 4 (2005): 377.

35 Asking Google Images to search for the endpaper photograph, one gets back images of ornamental structures. Only when feeding Google Images an enlarged detail, does it return us to photography – in fact, to The Family of Man.

36 Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 154–5.

39 I am here following Delaney’s neat enumeration of the contents of the exhibition.

41 Ibid., 80. The image has been identified as that of the detonation of test Mike, Operation Ivy, Enewetak Atoll, 31 October 1952. See John O’Brian, ‘The Nuclear Family of Man’, Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-John-O_Brian/2816/article.html (accessed 10 January 2016).

44 Rolf Seeliger, ‘Testament der Photolinse’, unidentified newspaper clipping in ‘Pressespiegel’, Städtische Galerie München.

46 Witold Wirpsza, ‘4. Prawo’, in Komentarze do fotografii The Family of Man (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1962), 14. Translation by Benjamin Paloff in this volume.

49 Miller, 45. He also refers to the exhibit’s photographs as ‘family’, 51.

52 Ibid., 212. Compare Max Horkheimer’s brief comment: ‘Even the funny old magician from Bechuanaland, who has evoked so much laughter among the women and boys, has something about him that every one of us could have. No less than the Sicilian and Japanese peasants or the students in the lecture hall or the audience at the Paris Opera.’

53 The photographer Gabriele Nothelfer suggested that the 1955 Berlin visitors were grateful for the absence of atrocity photographs, cited in Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Verleugnete Bilder’, 90.

56 Desig #481.902 W/S #26536 CD # 0230, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

57 Information provided by Judith Cohen. This second photograph is now the subject of monograph-length studies. See, for example, Dan Porat, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010).

58 Monica Bravo, ‘Aesthetics of Reception? A Jaussian Reading of The Family of Man’, Art Criticism 14, no. 1 (2009): 26.

59 KKF V 96 / 54: see LUMINA-Propaganda-Liste, 1 August 1958, and letters of 4 November 1958 and 19 January and 8 February 1959. The Munich show had more than 30,000 visitors, which director of the Galerie Arthur Rümann found ‘regrettable’, except that the surplus permitted him to buy more work by Munich artists. See ‘Ankäufe der städtischen Galerie München 1946/1956’, 44.

60 Katharina Fackler, ‘Picturing the Poor: Poverty, Photography, and Politics in the 1960s’, ms. 2015; John Szarkowski, The Family of Man, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: MoMA, 1994), 12–37.

61 Karl Gernot Kuehn, Caught: The Art of Photography in the German Democratic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 56–7.

62 Sandeen, ‘International Reception’, 352, mentions the photograph demonstrating Brecht’s presence, and Gerd Hurm and Shamoon Zamir refer to Brecht’s visit in the context of Brecht’s Kriegsfibel and Aus der Friedensfibel. See their contributions to this volume.

63 Max Horkheimer, ‘Opening of the Photo-Exhibition The Family of Man – All of Us’, 62.

64 KKF V 96 / 54: Horkheimer letter to Peter-Kristian Ledig, 5 October 1958, in response to Ledig’s letter of invitation, 30 September 1958. Horkheimer was a member of the Kuratorium Kulturelles Frankfurt.