9 Structures of Rhyme, Forms of Participation
The Family of Man as Exhibition
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 [as The Family of Man], 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.
Edward Steichen (1963)1
Many accounts of The Family of Man restrict descriptions of the exhibition to how it guided visitors through the stages of the human life cycle, how representations of birth, childhood, teenage life, adulthood and death were intertwined with scenes of family intimacy and nurturing, play, education, work, leisure activities, and how the physical design of the exhibition embodied the idea of human commonality by immersing visitors in a spectacular and overwhelming visual articulation of its grand theme. Some accounts additionally acknowledge the inclusion of images of social protest, war and the pursuit of justice through law, suffrage and collective governance, and reframe Steichen’s project as a progressive, liberal plea for an incorporative cosmopolitanism. But no matter how these accounts interpret the exhibition’s particular brand of humanism, whether they are sympathetic to or critical of its social and ethical impulses, they have one thing in common: they do not engage in close readings of The Family of Man, no sustained consideration, that is, of how exactly a particular image sequence or room constructed its meanings, of how one room was in dialogue with another, or how certain visual motifs travelled and changed through the exhibition and why. This is because in reducing the exhibition to a grand theme, and by focusing on how this theme is carried by a supposedly propulsive curatorial design, they present Steichen’s installation as a structure that seeks to resolve all contradictions and difficulties within a unified message. Such an approach projects onto the exhibition design an aesthetic and conceptual logic that renders close examination irrelevant; the broad truth or meaning is what matters, not its particular iteration. The crafted architecture of The Family of Man in fact activated meanings and experiences far more varied than those made visible by either the persistent focus on a singular thematics or on Steichen’s curatorial achievement as a machine for compelling attention into what effectively amounts to distraction. In what follows, I do no more than begin to look at what I take to be neglected aspects of The Family of Man’s exhibition design as it was installed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1955, and to suggest some of the ways in which this may also begin to reshape our understanding of the show.2
Olivier Lugon offers a representative statement of the approach to the exhibition that combines the thematic and formal emphases from which I suggest it is necessary to move away in order to take a fresh look at The Family of Man:
Everything […] hinged on the continual displacement of the beholder, whose every movement interiorized the theme of the endless flow of time and life […] According to this logic, nothing should interrupt the flow of visitors, no image should so arrest the eye that the movement of the masses comes to a halt […] The ideal some fifty years earlier [when Steichen curated exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery] of prolonged attention when viewing a photograph here was taken as a sign of failure. A steady flow of visitors was favored over focused reflection. Spectators were being invited, in a way, to look without looking, especially when faced with the most problematic images. Social and political disorders were displayed only to be immediately forgotten, to be appreciated in passing as generic images of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.3
Steichen’s own description of his MoMA installation, the first part of which is quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, contradicts Lugon’s account at almost every point. Steichen suggests that the purpose of the design of The Family of Man was in fact to make available a variety of speeds by encouraging the viewer’s freedom, and not, as accounts such as Lugon’s would suggest, to impose a relentless forward flow that herded the viewer through. The viewer can ‘hurry along’, as Steichen says, but he or she can also ‘go forward and then retreat’. This forward and backward movement is the movement of reflection through comparison invited by the shifting perspectives and juxtapositions of the exhibition; and as the readings that follow demonstrate, it should be understood not only as a physical movement, a bodily manifestation of the mind negotiating the range of meanings and effects immediately before it, but also as a mental movement back and forth across rooms and sequences that occurs even as the viewer progresses through the exhibition, and that uses the memory of what has already been seen to construct patterns of connection between these rooms and sequences that cut across the flow of the exhibition. Steichen’s viewer is not passive; nor is the viewer’s exercise of freedom a wilful resistance to the restrictive manipulations of the exhibition design. Steichen’s description proposes instead that The Family of Man becomes active in its meanings when the agency of the viewer and that of the exhibition itself work in dialogue, when ‘impulse and mood […] are stimulated by the exhibition’.
On one level The Family of Man certainly invited the viewer to experience it most immediately as a flow. However, this one-directional flow carried within it many eddies and countercurrents. If the sweeping flow unfolded through a progressive succession of images and themes, the countermovements were shaped above all by a series of visual associations which accumulated as the viewer moved through the exhibition, a detail or a motif from one image being picked up by another, often several rooms apart, the recollection of the earlier image creating the backward pull and pause of memory even as the narrative and the architecture of the exhibition moved the viewer forwards in both space and time. I have called these visual associations rhymes because they construct the mental and affective experiences of the viewer as an ever-shifting configuration that is first and foremost musical in its operations, and that cannot always be put into words and explained easily.
Visitors were not invited to ‘look without looking’ at ‘the most problematic images’, and ‘social and political disorders’ were not displayed only so that they could ‘immediately be forgotten’. Steichen’s design integrated, or tried to integrate, difficult and unpalatable truths as necessary conditions for accepting the exhibition’s concluding resolutions. The Family of Man was a comedy: it was governed by the mythos of spring and the spirit of union and reconciliation; its final image showed a boy and a girl walking together out of deep shadows into the bright sunlight of a leafy garden, and the images of children in the last room were crowned by a quotation from As You Like It.4 But just as in a Shakespearean comedy or a novel by Jane Austen the troubling notes continue to reverberate through the final reassuring resolution, so too in The Family of Man our grasp of the ending is poorer if we have already erased the memory of the drama that has brought us to it.
The representations of the life cycle and the celebrations of everyday life in The Family of Man should be understood as only chapters in a larger narrative. The exhibition moves from the private to the public realm, from the enclosure of family life, from necessity and labour, from the distractions and pleasures of leisure, to education and thought, and to social and political engagement. The narrative of the human life cycle actually came to an end roughly halfway through the exhibition. At the end of the fifth room were two convex panels hung with images of death and mourning (FoM 142). As visitors passed between these panels, they faced a floor-to-ceiling photograph (by Andreas Feininger) of a crowded Fifth Avenue at mid-afternoon. The architecture of the exhibition created, in other words, a ritual passage from death into the living community of the contemporary world.5 From this point on, the thematic emphasis of the exhibition shifted to a focus on social inequality, protest, public debate, suffrage, law and government. To the extent that images of private and family life continued to appear, such as images of young adults at play, they did so now as a point of contrast to the public world and its imperatives unfolding before them. In the final room, the family was in fact absorbed into the United Nations (see illustration 1).6
The Family of Man structures this larger narrative with a formal intricacy that has not been acknowledged before. This is a claim that has significant implications for our understanding of the meanings of the exhibition; it is also a claim that requires a renewed examination of what Fred Turner, in what is perhaps the most compelling reading of Steichen’s exhibition design to date, has referred to as ‘modes of attention’ and the ‘politics of attention’.7 Where Eric Sandeen, in his foundational study, devoted most of his discussion to the cultural and political contexts of The Family of Man, Turner shifts his focus to an analysis of the formal aspects of the exhibition and offers a highly persuasive framing of the role played by the architectural and display dynamics of the MoMA installation in furthering the humanist ambitions of Steichen’s project within the liberal cultural and social imperatives of 1950s America. Turner proposes that ‘a deeply democratic, even utopian, impulse […] drove the show and much of the early audience response to it’ because there was an ‘antiauthoritarian politics behind its design and the modes of attention it solicited from visitors’.8 Turner carefully unfolds this assessment within an account of the post-war debates about the natures of authoritarian and democratic personalities, and about the cultural modes needed for fostering and developing the latter. This contextualization provides a strong foundation for the claim that ‘The Family of Man thus became less a vehicle for a single message than a three-dimensional arena in which visitors could practice acts of mutual recognition, choice, and empathy – the core perceptual and affective skills on which democracy depended.’9
But when Turner moves from his conceptualization of the overall structure of the MoMA installation to an actual reading of it, he reverts to a walk-through description that is much the same as Sandeen’s earlier and equally general one.10 Turner pauses only once to comment at any length on a particular image group: the photographs of American, Japanese, Italian and Bechuanaland (today Botswana) families that form the thematic and physical pivot of the whole exhibition (see illustration 2). As Turner notes, ‘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.’ They did not privilege ‘whites or Americans’, but in fact ‘equated’ them with groups that were at that time the objects of prejudice or hostility, because of their race or because they were former enemies from the recent war. ‘To stand among these images,’ then, ‘was not to perceive the Africans or Japanese as somehow lesser people but, instead, to recognize a likeness between them and more dominant groups. Though the images certainly echoed stereotypes, they also solicited empathy – and that at a time when such fellow feeling was rare in the United States.’11
On the one hand, this is a largely accurate distillation of the liberal project of The Family of Man – and the reading of form and content I develop works to an extent within the critical framework established by Turner, and in sympathy with his political assessment. On the other hand, Turner’s account, like so many less compelling accounts of the exhibition, distorts in significant ways the political, ethical and affective complexities of Steichen’s design by bypassing altogether the numerous problems with which the show confronts, and the questions it poses to, its own globally incorporative cultural ambitions, and to its celebratory view of the family. Most surprisingly perhaps, despite the fact that Turner draws attention to the democratic potential of The Family of Man, he does not engage at all with the actual representation of democratic and global citizenship throughout the second half of the exhibition. One way to signal what is at stake here is to say that, in the example of the family photographs presented by Turner as illustrative of the cultural meanings and formal processes of the exhibition, empathy is both solicited and given too easily for it to be a true test for the politics of participatory democracy in mid-century America.
There were other passages in the MoMA version of The Family of Man that were, in their aesthetic strategies and their cultural meanings, more difficult than the one Turner chooses as exemplary. In these passages, there was a more acute sense that empathy, and so too ‘mutual recognition’ and ‘choice’, involve a labour, that they are ends to be achieved, because in order to get to them the viewer must first confront the challenge posed by the many varieties of cultural and social displacements of the self the exhibition invited. The process of negotiating the mental and affective experiences generated by the network of associations I have called the structures of rhyme did not, properly speaking, present viewers with a set of choices between a range of identifications that were driven by the impulses of empathy and mutual recognition, though these impulses were, in their own right, active throughout the exhibition. Rather, the rhymes and associations entangled the viewers in the vying claims of multiple cultural and social realities, claims that choice must assess if it is to become the informed choice that is a necessity for participatory democracy. One of the most frequently repeated assertions about The Family of Man is that it ignores the claims of difference and history in its insistent celebration of a common humanity or human nature. At least some of the images and layouts I examine in fact insist on cultural and social difference as the reality that must be faced if choosing commonality is to have any real meaning – these images measure the viewers’ understanding and acceptance of the common ground proposed by the exhibition by the degree of their critical reflection on their own social location and cultural selves in relation to others.
I examine the second and seventh rooms or sections of the exhibition as it was installed at MoMA (see illustration 26). The second room contained images of mothers with children and of fathers with sons and so can be read easily as only a continuation of the first long room that presented viewers with images of lovers, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and motherly nurture of babies. At the very end of the first room were photographs of children at play, and as the viewers turned left from these into the second room, the theme of play was continued on the right-hand wall, thus further connecting the two rooms. But the second room also displayed images that marked striking departures from the reassuring narrative of affection and joy established by the images (or at least by most of the images) in the previous room. There were images of abandoned and lonely children and shocking images of children committing acts of violence against other children and against adults. Equally significant was the introduction into the continued theme of motherhood and nurturing of differences of race and class. The second room was, then, an interruption in the exhibition’s flowing celebration of family life. This is important because all viewers had to move through this room before reaching the large space of the third room with the group of American, Bechuanaland, Japanese and Italian family pictures at its centre; in other words, the disjunctive experience of the second room helped frame an approach to the pivotal statement of the exhibition’s core theme. It is clear from the rest of Steichen’s exhibition design that the experience of the second room was not intended merely as a momentary disturbance that was to be absorbed by the cosmopolitan empathy and fellowship of the family group portraits. The second room introduced notes into the exhibition that continued to sound throughout its later movements. The visual motifs and layouts of the second room were most notably picked up in remarkably subtle and unexpected ways in the seventh room that dealt with hard times and famine, man’s inhumanity to man, and social protest and revolt. If the family group portraits were the most obvious axis around which the exhibition revolved, the dialogue between rooms two and seven signalled another structuring axis that ran in parallel throughout the installation. The reading of the second room is, then, also an entrance into a reading of this larger structure and dynamic.
26 Floor plan, The Family of Man, on view 24 January–8 May 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
***
At the threshold of what we can take as the second room or section, visitors found themselves at a distance of about 27 feet from the back wall, and this is more or less the point from which Ezra Stoller took his installation shot of the room (see illustration 27).12 The central panel of the back wall was a floor-to-ceiling image of a leafless tree, and on this panel had been fixed a series of small prints (wall 2d). From the threshold, one could have seen that these images were also of children, but it would not have been clear what exactly the children were doing. By contrast, on the two white panels that extended to the left and right of the central panel, there were two large photographs whose contents would have been quite clear. To the left was a picture (38” x 38”, by Diane and Allan Arbus, FoM53) of a father and son lying on a couch together, reading. On the right was the image (38” x 33¼”, by Wayne Miller, FoM 33) that would have been clearest of all: a mother lying down, with her young daughter sitting on the bed beside her holding a baby. This picture more than any other would have immediately suggested a continuity between the first and the second rooms: the woman was in fact Joan Miller, Wayne Miller’s wife, the same woman visitors had seen giving birth in the childbirth section of the first room. And the baby we see being held by the girl is the same child seen being born in the first.
27 The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Once visitors moved further into the second part of section two, they would have seen more clearly the row of seven photographs along the right wall (wall 2c), all of them identical in their vertical dimension (16’) (see illustration 28). Six of these showed mothers with young children – the exception was the first image in the sequence. This showed a group of shabbily dressed boys on a back porch, clearly at a pause in the midst of play. This image linked back then to the previous two clusters of images of children at play. This strategy of using an image as a sort of stitch to connect sequences, to create continuity between them, was one that was used repeatedly throughout the exhibition. This line of photographs guided visitors to the large photograph of the young Miller family, the image that most loudly declared this continuity. But the second room presented the viewer with much more than a mere repetition of the themes from the opening section of the exhibition: it staged a continuity only to invite the viewer to reflect critically on the familial forms so far introduced.
28 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
The image of the Miller family, along with the matching image of the father and son on the couch to its left, together appear to encapsulate what has so often been claimed, and criticized, as the core ideology of The Family of Man: the white, bourgeois American family lifted from the pages of Life magazine, and constructed by the exhibition as the universal familial norm for the MoMA visitors who imagined themselves reflected in the images before them. But it was precisely at this point, and this early on in the exhibition, that Steichen’s layout invited the audience to hold back from projecting its own cultural assumptions and social values as normative and universal.
The photos of mothers and children along the right wall of the second room conducted visitors not only to the Miller family but also to the large photograph of an African American woman with two children by Consuelo Kanaga (34” x 25¾”, FoM 32) placed towards the farthest corner of the right wall, at a 90-degree angle to the Miller photograph. The uniform line of pictures of mothers and children along the wall pointed to the Miller photograph as a climactic and emphatic statement of the themes of motherhood and family. The Kanaga image was placed literally above and outside the directional and thematic flow of this photographic sequence. The physical dynamics of Steichen’s display, the way that it proposed a movement for the body of the viewer, is important here. The smaller pictures were placed a little below eye level and would have required the viewer wanting to see them properly to approach them and to bend down or to tilt the head slightly. As viewers came to the end of this row of images, they would have turned to face the Miller image which was hung so that the eye level was at the centre of the image, and the size of the image produced an immersive experience of familial intimacy quite distinct from the experience of looking at such a photograph in the family album of a relative, friend or stranger. The Kanaga image, on the other hand, was hung above eye level. Given the contrast in size between it and the photographs below it, and its pronounced verticality, both in format and content, it would have required viewers to step back and look up. What they would have faced as they did so was a dramatic shift in mood and meaning.
The Kanaga image served as an interlocutor and inquisitor of both the Miller photograph and of the MoMA visitors themselves. There is as much love in the Kanaga photograph as there is in any of the other images of mothers and children. But the sense of joy that marks all the other images has been drained from it. In its place there is a sense of a stony yet precarious fortitude born of adversity. The intense glare of the afternoon light that flattens the woman and her two children against the harsh white of the breeze block wall contrasts sharply with the comforting domestic interior in Miller’s image, and the differences of race and class between white and black families would have been as immediately apparent to the visitors to The Family of Man at MoMA as they are to us today. And of course these same differences would have marked an equal distance between most of the visitors themselves and the family in Kanaga’s photograph.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Kanaga’s image is the way in which the eyes of the mother and the two children transform the mere appearance of difference into an active question about the place of difference within the exhibition’s quest for commonality. Steichen’s layout and his choice of photographs for this section of the second room both signal an awareness of this potential in the image. Out of all the mothers-and-children images in this room, Kanaga’s is the only one in which any of the subjects directly look at the photographer-viewer, and Steichen’s placing of the image above eye level, a tactic that accentuates the effect of Kanaga’s low shooting angle, means that the image would have looked down at the viewer, not in judgement but as cautiously interrogative. Is this family the ‘same’ as the Miller family? Can this family be incorporated into ‘the family of man’ without an acknowledgement of what separates it from the Miller family? Is it really the case that Steichen is oblivious to the differences his own exhibition design foregrounds? Does this design invite an inattentive immersion in the broad spectacle of image constellations or does it make possible a more reflective engagement? The eyes of the little girl in the shadow of her mother are just visible; they are hard to read but the way the girl holds her left arm behind her and clings to her mother with her right betokens a sense of apprehension and unease. The boy’s engagement with the photographer is less reserved and cautious, and his eyes are not yet marked by the wariness, hardship and fatigue that are evident in his mother’s eyes. The photographer is a stranger and the holding back of trust is palpable in the sense of awkwardness in the image, and in the sense of both affection and vulnerability in the way the mother’s right arm pulls her son to her side. The Miller photograph is very much a family photograph made public; the mother, daughter and son are enclosed in their own world; the viewer who is a stranger is not a shaping presence in the scene because the photographer is the husband and the father, and so part of the private world pictured, rather than an intruder in it. In the Kanaga image it seems as if the family has been stopped as it walked down the street and been asked to exhibit in a public space the bonds that hold it together, and at the same time to expose the marks of the social and cultural forces that make such cohesion a perpetual travail. Kanaga’s achievement as a photographer, in this image at least, hovers on the border of predictable social documentary, but Steichen’s placing of the image high up on the wall structures, in the context of the other images in the sequence around it, a relationship with the MoMA visitor that forestalls the potential objectification of subjects in social documentary and brings to the fore the sense of dignity and agency also available in the image.
Roland Barthes articulated what has been widely repeated as the standard critique of The Family of Man when he argued that the exhibition erased the differences of time, place, culture and social experience, or in other words, history itself; that instead of pursuing a ‘progressive humanism’ fully engaged with these differences, it proposed a ‘myth of the human “condition”’ sustained by an appeal to a human commonality grounded in nature. Barthes drives home his point most sharply by deploying rhetorically the facts of racial violence and inequality to pose the question of ‘History’ to The Family of Man: ‘why not ask the parents of Emmet [sic] Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?’; ‘let us also ask the North African workers of the Goutte d’Or district in Paris what they think of The Great Family of Man’.13
The Kanaga photograph of the African American mother and her two children, I would argue, already asks the question about history and difference that Barthes wants to address to the exhibition. It is in fact an early formulation of a series of such questions that emerge as the exhibition unfolds. Later sections of the exhibition included images precisely of the racial violence and the legacies of colonialism Barthes invoked as challenges to the exhibition: room seven included, at least in the first iteration of The Family of Man, a graphic image of the lynching of an African American man, and one of a South African black man protesting against the rule of apartheid. The photograph of the lynching had been removed by the time the exhibition reached Paris, but the South African image was still in the show.
I have used Barthes’s articulation of the claims of history to describe what I see as the work done by the Kanaga image within The Family of Man, and so to try and turn this articulation, and the assessment it supports, against themselves. But a mere reversal of the terms by which Barthes structures his assessment is not sufficient for opening up a richer reading of Steichen’s exhibition. An ‘eternal lyricism’ does exercise a strong pull throughout the exhibition but the true and most meaningful opposite of history in Steichen’s design is not nature, but private life and its resistance to history, a resistance to what John Berger has called history’s ‘monopoly of time’.14 In the Miller photograph, the family is enclosed not only in its own space but also in its own time. For the Miller photograph to act as a true interlocutor of the Kanaga image it had to offer something more than mere bourgeois self-regard, to be more than a weak foil for the challenge of difference. Barthes’s sense of the deficiencies of The Family of Man must have been shaped, at least partly, by the recent experience of war. The war made certain political and ethical concerns imperatives, and Steichen’s response to these seemed inadequate to Barthes. But Steichen’s deployment of the Miller photograph, whatever its original context, in relation to difference and as counterpoint to what Barthes calls history, must be understood as having its own historicity. The people who came to see the exhibition at MoMA, and the majority of the millions who saw it around the world, had lived through several years of a war unprecedented in its global scale and violence, years when it must have seemed as if life consisted of nothing but history. In the years that followed the close of the war, the claims of private life must have been felt especially keenly, and in ways that it may be difficult to grasp for those of us, at least within the relative security and stability of Western Europe and North America, who continue to grapple with The Family of Man. The affective intensity of this appeal was, I suspect, a significant factor contributing to the worldwide success of the exhibition.
In order, then, to recover a true sense of dialogue in the juxtaposition of the Miller and Kanaga photographs, we need to reimagine the lines of force that might have structured the visual experience generated for the MoMA audience by this juxtaposition, and others like it, in 1955. We need, for one thing, to imagine what it must have been like for a largely white and middle-class audience at MoMA to be looking at the Kanaga photograph in tandem with Miller’s only months after the Supreme Court’s (17 May 1954) decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education had abolished segregation in American schools. The Family of Man in fact offers a sustained engagement with race, inequality and injustice that is remarkable given the fact that it predates the dramatic developments of the Civil Rights movement in the second half of the decade.
Looking back from the twenty-first century, after the Civil Rights movement, feminism, multiculturalism, anti-colonial movements and post-colonial studies and the many theorizations of difference have all reshaped our perceptual and cultural frameworks, it is perhaps easier to accord immediate sympathy to Kanaga’s African American family than it is do so with Miller’s white family. An awareness of issues of class, gender, ethnicity and cultural and patriarchal hegemony that have in many ways overdetermined our understanding of the post-war United States, and given us the cliché of ‘the conformist fifties’, may help us better understand the relationship between these two photographs, but it may also get in the way of this understanding. For the vast majority of MoMA visitors, Miller’s photograph would have been less mediated, and the Kanaga photograph would have posed a more radical challenge than it does today, a challenge that Steichen’s layout did its best to ensure that the visitors faced. The identification of the mother and two children in the Kanaga image as Americans in the small caption attached to the photograph, and the contemporaneity signalled by their clothing were, it would seem, calculated to add emphasis to this address to the audience: the Kanaga image was ‘sandwiched’ between two large photographs of black individuals, a picture by Lennart Nilsson of a mother cradling an infant in a forest in the Belgian Congo, and one by Nat Farbman from Bechuanaland of a father teaching his son to hunt (wall 2e, FoM 28, 51); the Nilsson image brought the sequence of images of mothers and children in the first room to a climax and the Farbman image concluded the fathers and son sequence in the second room that followed the Kanaga and Miller images; in both the Nilsson and Farbman photographs, the figures were near naked, in a forest or hunting on the savannah, and could easily have been read as ‘primitive’ and so as distant ‘others’; the same could not be said of the mother and children in the Kanaga image, and Steichen’s layout seemed designed to bring home to the MoMA visitors the proximity of their African American compatriots.15
The Kanaga photograph was not the only image to introduce a dissonant note into the second room, and not the only one to articulate the challenge of prejudice in the midst of cosmopolitan diversity. As mentioned earlier, there was a cluster of images considerably smaller than the Miller and Kanaga photographs placed on the central panel of the back wall, to the left of the Miller family. These images fell, broadly, into two groups: images that recast childhood nurture as forms of abandonment and isolation, and those that recast play as forms of violence (see illustration 29). If the size and location of the Kanaga photograph constructed for it had a declarative impact and the ability to subordinate the viewers to its own gaze, making them step back and look up, the smaller pictures on the back wall relied on a perceptual intimacy for their affect on viewers. They only revealed their contents fully as visitors approached them, and the fact that almost all of them were placed either just above or just below the average eye line meant that the viewer was encouraged to lean in a little if he or she wanted to take a better look. These images were pasted onto the floor-to-ceiling image of gnarled and leafless branches and twigs (the image was by Steichen himself though he was not identified as the photographer), and the faces of the children in them seemed to emerge out of the dark interior of the woody entanglements that Steichen’s display used as a metaphor for what the textual caption (from Lillian Smith) across the top of these images referred to as ‘that silent place where a child’s fears crouch’.
29 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
Nothing in the exhibition so far had prepared visitors for these images. The photographs of childhood aggression in particular were visually and emotionally eruptive, and especially unsettling: the clenched fist of the boy about to hit another; the little boy about to bring down a plank of wood on a woman who has raised her hands to protect herself; almost the same gestures caught in a fight between a girl and a boy over what appears to be a soft toy; and perhaps the most unnerving image of all, a young girl tied to a tree, ‘caught’, in film critic Vernon Young’s apt description, ‘in a twist of fear that she may be the victim in a game that has gone too far’ (FoM 46–7).16
The pictures of isolated children to the left of those of childhood violence were moving but the majority of them could more easily be assimilated into the conventions of social documentary – they were very much the kinds of images that had become familiar in the United States thanks to the many documentary projects undertaken by the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. Six of the nine appeared to be images drawn from the rural and urban poor, but three clearly registered abandonment within the context of the middle-class world: a mother sits on a comfortable chair, preoccupied with the contents of a box on her lap, while a young and apprehensive boy stands pressed against the wall behind her, his hands clasped in a gesture of patient waiting and fear (FoM 134); in the midst of a busy party with musicians where all is in motion, a young girl is caught standing alone, ignored by the adults in the room (FoM 132); and a well dressed mother strides down a city street, her young son following behind, his head bowed (FoM 47).17
These images, and the images of aggression in which markers of class were either unclear or not emphatically underlined, did not allow the MoMA audience to easily distance itself from the social experiences shown. Both to the left and to the right an image from this cluster extended beyond the central panel and encroached onto the image of the father and son by Diane and Allan Arbus and the Miller photograph, as if to indicate that the realities made visible on the central panel could not simply be cordoned off from the more comfortable securities of the larger family photographs. And it was the photograph of the striding mother, clearly middle class, that overlapped with the panel with the Miller family photograph, as if this woman was walking straight into the family’s space.
The connection between the back panel and the images of maternal and paternal nurture to either side of it was made equally, though with more varied affect, by Steichen’s metaphorical use of the tree in his layout. The leafless branches of the tree in the large back panel photograph, which stood for a blighted childhood, referred the visitors back to the Kanaga image and to the text placed immediately beneath it: ‘She is a tree of life to them … (Proverbs 3:18).’18 The sharp ironies of this contrast would have added another layer to the way visitors saw the African American mother. The text from Proverbs only reinforces what is already evident in the photograph itself: that the mother is a figure of shelter, strength and sustenance. But the contrast with the lifeless tree of the back panel pushes to the fore her sameness with the mothers in the other images around her rather than her difference. They are all, equally, trees of life to their children. This does not contradict or undermine my own earlier reading that the function of the Kanaga family portrait was to help introduce the claims of difference into the exhibition. It is in fact one of the effects consistently achieved by Steichen’s exhibition design that a shift in perspective can reconfigure the meanings of a particular image or group of images, and in some instances this happened several times over as visitors moved through the rooms. The Kanaga image is a good example of this because it functioned within this structure of multiplicity in ways other than those already noted for it.
More often than not in The Family of Man the quotations from world literature and folk traditions, chosen by Dorothy Norman, were placed among, above or below image groups. This created the sense that the images were collectively constellated around the theme signalled by the text. In the case of the Kanaga photograph (and there are other examples of this in the exhibition) the text from Proverbs is attached directly to the bottom edge of the image, as if, even as it applied to all the images of motherhood around it, it somehow applied more specifically or more emphatically to the African American mother. The exhibition design used the metaphor of the tree to construct this individualized link, I believe, because what connected Kanaga’s family portrait and the images of childhood violence and abandonment was not just a contrastive view of parental care and its failure, but also the problem of race and racism. This thematic engagement was only obliquely present in the images on the back panel but it is something that becomes visible as we reflect further on the design of this section of the exhibition, and then on its relationship with later sections.
The back panel photographs of children departed from the expectations established by the exhibition so far in another important respect: all 13 images were of white children (and three white adult women), whereas all the previous sequences, like all the ones that were to follow, displayed cultural and ethnic diversity. And nine were from the United States, the other four being from Canada, Poland, Italy and Sweden. So the focus was entirely on North America and Western Europe. It was as if Steichen wanted to hold a mirror up to an audience he knew would, at least in the United States, be largely white and predominantly middle class. This group of images would seem then to shift attention away from familial nurture to something like childhood fractures in the ‘white psyche’, broadly understood beyond the causal explanations of a particular class or environment. One could argue that to the extent that these images focused implicitly on ‘whiteness’, they could be read as addressing, though extremely obliquely, the issue of race; the caption that accompanied these images made such a reading more plausible.
As noted earlier, the quotation that accompanies this set of photographs is taken from the work of Lillian Smith: ‘deep inside in that silent place where a child’s fears crouch’. There is nothing in the quotation itself to indicate that issues of race are of concern. But Smith, herself white and Southern, was known almost exclusively for her outspoken and controversial critiques of the culture of segregation and prejudice in the American South. Her novel Strange Fruit (1944) dramatized both an interracial romance and lynching. Even though the book was banned in Boston and Detroit, and briefly banned also from being mailed through the US Postal Service, until Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and had her husband remove the prohibition, it proved to be an enormous commercial success nationwide. The essays in Killers of a Dream (1949) explored the psychological damage done to children, white and black, by the culture of segregation, and the ways in which the seeds of racism and racial violence are sown at this early stage. The ‘lessons’ learned in childhood were, Smith declared, ‘the white man’s burden’.19 The quotation used in the exhibition was from The Journey (1954), published just months before the exhibition opened; it was extracted from an account of childhood fears of death in the face of high levels of illness and mortality in the South, rather than from a discussion of racism.20 But the recognition of Lillian Smith’s name would have been far more important than identifying the source of the quotation. The association of Smith with issues of racism would have been available to any visitor with a basic familiarity with contemporary literary culture and social debate, and the exhibition’s layout ensured that visitors would have read Smith’s name under the gaze of the African American woman in Kanaga’s photograph.
To read the Smith quotation as something more than a comment on universal childhood psychology, to read it additionally as an indirect comment on racism, and so as a sort of response to the Kanaga photograph and the ‘tree of life’ text attached to it, may with justification appear as an over-reading, at least at this stage of the discussion. But when we turn from the second room to the seventh, we will see that photographs that dealt with racial inequality and violence in the later room created some of the strongest links back to the earlier section of the exhibition, not only to the Kanaga image but also to the images of childhood isolation and aggression. Once these connections are seen, it becomes more difficult to put aside the larger range of meanings Smith’s words would have made available in 1950s America.21
***
Roughly 15 feet in width and 22 feet in length, with an entrance at one end and an exit at the opposite end, the seventh room, like the room before it and the one after, was more conventional in its structure than some of the other spaces in the exhibition. As Sandeen has noted, the ‘traffic flow was much more constricted’ in the later sections of the MoMA installation. These rooms were ‘the most traditionally arranged’, and required ‘the contemplation and introspection of a more confined space’.22 My own reading suggests that the demands of contemplation and introspection were in fact always present in The Family of Man, albeit in a variety of forms, but Sandeen does register accurately a certain shift in pace and attention in the exhibition brought about by the changes in spatial design.
Along the right wall (wall 7d) were photographs of young adults, engaged largely in leisure activities: fooling around on the beach, racing along in an open-top car, jammed together on a crowded dance floor (see illustration 30). While most of these images included both young men and women, five portraits of young women were placed along the top edge of the display. Each showed a closely cropped, individual face, and in each case the eyes were turned away to the right. Three of the portraits seemed to be concerned with appearance: the woman from South Africa was applying make-up; the white American woman was holding a hair brush in her hand; and the African American woman was smartly dressed, with a large flower prominently placed in her hair. The portrait to the far left was less fashionably turned out but no less an example of introverted beauty. The remaining portrait, a white American and the youngest of the five women, signalled studiousness rather than vanity: she held a clipboard, book and pen. There were no equivalent portraits of young men, though there were three images to the right of men in groups of twos and threes, and in each case, in contrast to the portraits of women, the men stared out at the viewer. These gendered visual dynamics, as I hope to demonstrate, played a significant part in how visitors were invited to understand the images on the opposite wall in this room, and also the connections between the images in the seventh room and those encountered earlier in the second.
30 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
The wall opposite the pictures of young adults, and the two shorter side walls of the room, all to the left of the entrance, presented visitors with very different realities. Immediately to the left of the entrance, on the short sidewall and extending a little onto the long wall (walls 7a and b), were images of hunger, famine and hard times (see illustration 31). Apart from the spill over from this sequence, the long one was divided into two sections of unequal length. The first and shorter one dealt with man’s inhumanity to man (see illustration 32). The second, which extended across the remainder of the wall and along the short wall at the farthest end of the room (wall 7c), displayed pictures mostly of social protest and revolt (see illustrations 33 and 34). It was these photographs along the left side of the room that presented visitors with a series of visual motifs that most consistently invited them to recognize, and so to reflect on, associations between the images in this room and those they had seen in the second, though these were not the only images in the seventh room to propose such connections.
31 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
Among the photographs of hunger was Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ (1936) (FoM 151), the most widely reproduced photograph from the 1930s documentary archive of the Farm Security Administration. The composition of Lange’s photograph, with the two children pressed close against the mother and the baby in her arms, recalled the portrait of Joan Miller and her daughter and son, though the social reality captured by Lange was closer to the world of Kanaga’s African American family than to Miller’s, and the care-worn distraction of Lange’s mother separated her from the motherly attentiveness and solicitude of the women in both Miller’s and Kanaga’s images. The photograph of the animated and vocal Korean women behind a wooden barrier and a barbed wire fence could equally be read as a transfiguration of the three silent and still Canadian girls, slightly bemused, behind a wire fence on the central tree panel in the second room, the largest of the images there (FoM 169, 48).
32 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
Steichen made explicit the associations between the seventh room and the second by placing to the immediate left of the picture of the Korean demonstrators two images that otherwise seem entirely out of place: one was of a crawling and crying baby caught between the legs of two chairs and a table, as if in a cage; the other showed a young child behind the slats of a wooden gate (FoM 168). These photographs were positioned in between the images of inhumane acts and those of social protest but appeared to make little sense as a segue between these two sections. Their purpose, in fact, was to recall the images of the isolated and abandoned children from the second room. As if to underline this purpose, the picture of the trapped baby was by Wayne Miller and showed the very son held by Miller’s daughter in the family portrait in the second room, and the same child visitors had seen being born in the birth section of the first. And on the wall opposite, among the portraits of single women, were two photographs that further consolidated the structure of the seventh room as a transformed version of the second. The beautiful white woman with the hairbrush looked quite like Joan Miller; she was at least recognizably of the same type. And the young black woman to her left, though more elegantly dressed than the African American mother in the second room, was nevertheless the subject of a portrait by none other than Consuelo Kanaga. These two women were younger than the mothers seen earlier; they seemed preoccupied with themselves and their appearance and not turned outward towards the needs of others. There was then both an actual and a symbolic gulf between them and the two isolated children on the wall opposite. But the women also looked onto the images of social protest, and these photographs announced a move into an active participation in the public realm that was different to both the self-enclosure of individual identity and the activities that define the private realm of family life.
33 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
34 Rolf Petersen, installation view of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1955.
One function of the rhymes constructed by Steichen between the second and the seventh rooms was then to signal an evolution of agency. In the transformation of the Canadian children into the Korean protestors, it is as if the younger North American girls had pushed out of their childhood passivity and perplexity into social activism. A similar shift in agency is suggested by Homer Page’s striking photograph of a black South African man with a marching bass drum mallet in his hand that Steichen placed at the end of the sequence of social protest photographs (FoM 171). The physical dimensions of this print (46” x 29.5”), its placement (above the eye line and above the other images in the sequence) and its low shooting angle and the consequent verticality of its composition all recall Kanaga’s photograph of the African American mother and her two children. Here too, as with the transformation of the Canadian girls into the Korean female protesters, hesitation and a familial protectiveness are transformed into purposive, socially engaged action. The inquisitorial gaze of the black woman that subjects the viewer to its scrutiny in Kanaga’s image becomes aspirational in the photograph of the South African man. If the viewer experiences empathetic identification when looking at Page’s photograph, he or she shares also the hope that is implied by the drummer’s eyes that seem turned towards the sky. And as with the Kanaga family portrait, the portrait of the South African Man was accompanied by a Biblical quotation, and here too the text was attached directly to the bottom edge of the image: ‘Who is on my side? Who?’ (2 Kings 9.32). The implicitly interrogative gaze of the African American mother is here turned explicitly into an active question that asks the viewer to define his or her own commitments. There is nothing in Page’s portrait of the South African man to indicate that the man is engaged in political activity, but Steichen’s placing of the image as the climactic statement in a sequence of protest images clearly invited such a reading. The drum makes the protest audible, gives it a ‘voice’, just as the open mouths of the Korean demonstrators suggest speech. And it also signals a pointed transformation of the symbolism of the photograph of the Peruvian flute player which was repeated as a figure of harmony at several points throughout the exhibition. The movement from Kanaga’s photograph to Page’s can be described, then, as a movement from interiority to exteriority, from the enclosing familial embrace shaped by conditions of social and racial inequality to an active struggle against these forms of division and prejudice.
But racial prejudice was addressed most directly and forcefully by what was without question the most startling and most shocking visual rhyme between the seventh and the second rooms: this was the rhyme between the graphic image of the slumped body of a dead African American man tied to a tree, his hands bound behind his back, the visual record of a lynching, and the photograph seen earlier in the exhibition of the young girl also tied to a tree, her hands also bound tightly behind her, her turning body and blurred face captured in what looks like a moment of panic. It may be that the placing of the quotation from Lillian Smith above the picture of this girl, and above all the pictures of childhood violence and isolation, was merely fortuitous. If so, it proved to be a remarkable accident of design that nevertheless helped bring into view a configuration of unexpected meanings within a visual network that stretched across the exhibition.
In dwelling on Smith as a point of reference I am not suggesting that her inclusion in the exhibition was intended as a ‘key’ to meanings and connections otherwise invisible. Knowing who Smith was and what her writings were about added a focusing perspective on what tied the second and the seventh rooms together, but it was not a necessary condition for understanding or affectively experiencing the workings of these ties. The comparative readings of the images I have pursued should make it clear that the structures of rhyme and association that configured The Family of Man were equally available to any visitor attentive to the complexity and subtlety of Steichen’s visual orchestration independently of its textual accompaniments. If these connections set in motion critical reflection, they did so because they were first experienced, and perhaps more powerfully so, as a kind of disturbing consonance at the edge of consciousness, like a refrain from an earlier moment that haunts the unfolding of the later stages of a musical composition and stirs memory into activity.
The connections built up within the seventh room itself were experienced altogether more directly. The association made by Steichen’s layout between American racial prejudice and violence and South African apartheid was potentially explosive. The daring and power of Steichen’s challenge to the self-comforting clichés of American exceptionalism become clearer still when we register that not only did he place the photograph of the lynching in dialogue with the photograph of the South African man, but also placed it below two photographs of Jews being rounded up by Nazi soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and next to an image of blindfolded prisoners kneeling by a roadside and about to be executed by Chinese soldiers (FoM 166–7).23
The photograph of the Chinese execution was added to the exhibition several weeks after the opening at MoMA. Both it and the lynching photograph were then removed from the show some time later. The claim, often repeated, that the lynching image was removed after only two weeks is erroneous. The picture appears to have remained in the show up to the first week of April at least, so into the eleventh week of the exhibition’s fifteen-week run at MoMA, and it may have remained in the show even longer. This means that roughly two-thirds of the 270,000 visitors to MoMA, and maybe more, would have seen the image, and so also the iteration of The Family of Man that I have been examining. It is no doubt true, as Wayne Miller claimed, that one reason why Steichen decided to remove the image was because he came to see it as ‘dissonant to the composition’ and ‘to the theme’, its graphic quality too much of an interruptive ‘focal point’, distracting visitors from the exhibition as a whole.24 But a discussion among leading cultural figures in New York and Washington, not only about the impact of the photograph on the exhibition but above all about how the image would be received abroad, equally influenced Steichen’s decision, as did the publicity given to the photograph by Life in a multi-page photo-spread on the exhibition published in the 14 February edition of the magazine.25
The eventual removal of the lynching photograph from The Family of Man evidenced a regrettable failure of nerve on Steichen’s part, and it blunted the edge of the exhibition’s politics. But it is not the case that the removal simply negated the exhibition’s many social and political engagements and challenges. As John Roberts has argued, ‘in a period when the representation of black peoples in the [American] illustrated magazines as other than victims and “primitives” was politically non-existent’ and when there was ‘violent anti-leftism and racism in the USA’, Steichen’s inclusion of ‘a number of non-stereotypical images of black Americans’ was ‘actually progressive’.26 Roberts’s description, a welcome corrective though it is to many accounts of the exhibition, is perhaps too anodyne in its generality to capture precisely the energies that animate Steichen’s exhibition design. The African American women in Kanaga’s portraits and the South African man in Page’s can certainly be characterized as ‘non-stereotypical’ but what makes them truly ‘progressive’ is not their mere inclusion in the show but the way Steichen’s command of design implies (one could also say wishes for and encourages) a movement from the inequalities of the status quo to social protest, and does so by framing this movement not with a common ‘blackness’ or human nature, but within a racism that is common to the United States and South Africa. This linkage would have been made with less force once the lynching photograph was removed, but it would have remained available to visitors nonetheless. The problems of race and the struggle against inequality were very much in the air. The anti-segregation decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education inevitably framed the representations of race and racism in the exhibition, but 1955 was also the year that would conclude, only seven months after the close of Steichen’s show at MoMA but while it was still touring the US, with Rosa Parks’s refusal, on 1 December 1955, to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, an act which not only sparked the Montgomery bus boycott but also inaugurated the Civil Rights movement. One has only to imagine what it might have been like to encounter the dialogue between the African American mother and her children, and the South African drummer at this juncture to understand how Steichen’s exhibition design proposed a series of challenging social and political engagements to the visitors to The Family of Man.
Notes
1 New York: Bonanza Books, 1984, chap. 13 (no page numbers).
2 This chapter is an extract from a more detailed examination of the exhibition design, itself part of what will be a book-length study.
3 Olivier Lugon, ‘Edward Steichen as Exhibition Designer’, in Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography, ed. Todd Brandow and William E. Ewing (Minneapolis and Lausanne: Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and the Musée de l’Elysée, 2007), 271.
4 This is W. Eugene Smith’s famous ‘The Walk to Paradise Garden’ (1946). See Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 192. All further citations will be given in the text as ‘FoM’.
5 Eric Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 48, reads this passage quite differently as indicating that ‘individual suffering was transcended by mankind’s endurance’.
6 My framing of the narrative of The Family of Man as a movement from the private to the public realm is of course indebted to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), which appeared only three years after the opening of Steichen’s exhibit at MoMA, and to Arendt’s discussion of the relation of thought and action in the vita activa. Ariella Azoulay’s ‘The Family of Man: A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, in The Human Snapshot, ed. Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadar (Feldmeilen; Anandale-on-Hudson, Berlin: LUMA Foundation, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Sternberg Press, 2013), 19–48, is the only other account I know that significantly reframes the humanism of the exhibition through a new assessment of its politics. Azoulay reads the exhibition ‘as an archive containing the visual proxy of the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (20). While the reading presented here shares some of the political and ethical emphases of Azoulay’s reassessment, it pursues a very different analysis of the formal properties of the MoMA installation, and of the way these shaped the meanings of the exhibition.
7 Fred Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America’, Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 55–84. The article appeared in a revised form in Turner’s The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 6, ‘The Museum of Modern Art makes the World a Family’, 181–212.
8 Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention’, 57.
9 Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention’, 58.
10 Ibid., 76–81; Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 46–9.
11 Ibid., 78. Emphasis in the original.
12 The measurement is from the detailed architectural floor plan (Museum of Modern Art, New York, Edward Steichen Archive V.B.i.24*).
13 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (orig. 1957; London: Vintage, 2009), 122, 123–4. The exhibition was titled ‘La Grande Famille des Hommes’ when exhibited in France, hence Barthes’s use of ‘Great’. The Goutte d’Or is a neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement of Paris with a large North African population.
14 John Berger, ‘Appearances’, in Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Random House, 1982), 104. See also Shamoon Zamir, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chap. 4, ‘Against History’s Monopoly of Time’, 55–102.
15 For a more conventional ideological reading of these two images, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 58–65.
16 Young, ‘Fugue of Faces’, in Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 49.
17 The first two of these images were moved in the book to a much later section: 132, 134.
18 Ellipsis in the original. The King James version gives the full verse as follows: ‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.’ In the English Standard version it is, ‘She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed.’
19 ‘The Lessons’ is the title of the fifth chapter of the book and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ of the second part of the book. The Supreme Court had declared that ‘segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children’.
20 Lillian Smith, The Journey (1954; New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 43.
21 Gerd Hurm, in his contribution to the present volume, also suggests that the Smith quotation was meant to signal a concern with racism.
22 Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 48.
23 Only one of the Warsaw Ghetto images is reproduced in the book of the exhibition.
24 Miller interviewed by Sandeen, November 1984. In Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 50.
25 This account of the photographs of the lynching and the execution is based on a series of letters, written between late February and mid-March, between Neill Phillips, a retired Rear Admiral from the US Navy who was an important figure in the cultural world of Washington, DC; John Walker, Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art in DC; Philip Graham, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Washington Post; and William Burden, President of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records 569.85). It also draws on the transcript of a discussion between Steichen and staff at the United States Information Agency in Washington, DC, from 27 April 1955 (MoMA Exhibition Records 569.87). Before removing the lynching photograph, Steichen revised the label for the image and added a date: 1937. This would have been in March. The image of the Chinese execution appears to have been added at the same time. After the images were removed, Steichen must also have resized and rearranged the images from the Warsaw Ghetto in order to recalibrate the display; this is how they appeared subsequently in all the travelling versions of the exhibition in both the United States and abroad. As far as I am aware, the inclusion and removal of the photograph of the execution, and the changes made to the lynching and Warsaw Ghetto photographs have not been discussed before. I hope to provide a more detailed account of all these revisions elsewhere. The Life magazine spread (132–43) not only reproduced the lynching photograph, but actually combined images from the second and seventh rooms across two pages, as if the editors had also registered some of the associations I have noted: the picture of the girl tied to the tree was placed directly opposite the photograph of the lynched man (140–1).
26 John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 122.