Aesthetics and Philosophy of Place in The Family of Man
Introduction: New Ways of Looking at The Family of Man
In contrast to the harsh criticism that Steichen’s The Family of Man has been subjected to, media theorist Fred Turner comes to a rather surprising conclusion in his recent article on the exhibit. He claims that ‘The Family of Man […] sought to make visible a new, more diverse, and more tolerant vision of both the United States and the globe and to do it in such a way as to enhance viewers’ intellectual and emotional independence.’1 To say that The Family of Man helped create a diverse and tolerant society consisting of independent human beings had not been the gist of the argument that characterized much of the abundant Family of Man criticism until then.2 In his article, Turner focuses on a contextualization of the perennial exhibit in the Cold War climate, arguing that Steichen’s exhibition fostered a more democratic type of personality and in the end even prefigured, at least to some degree, the protest and civil liberty developments associated with the 1960s. This astounding conclusion takes issue with the standard evaluations of The Family of Man as an exhibition that followed the model of a conservative, propagandistic photojournalist picture book. This negative evaluation was accentuated by Roland Barthes’s slanting review in which he called the exhibit ‘sentimentalized’, arguing that it failed to express a ‘progressive humanism’.3
Turner’s argument is based on the concept of personality types that gained relevance after World War II. According to this theory, the authoritarian type was considered as supportive of totalitarian regimes, with Germany or Japan prefiguring as prime examples of this type. The so-called democratic character, by comparison, supported the development of a diverse, tolerant society that America came to epitomize. Based on the conviction that totalitarianism was not a only a political but also a psychological condition, Theodor Adorno and others then conducted studies of the so-called authoritarian mind. According to them, a typical German family set-up, with a cruel unforgiving father demanding absolute obedience, were among the factors leading to the spread of the authoritarian type.4 The success of this type is predicated on a system of evaluation based on ‘likeness’, that is, the nation is conceptualized in terms of a family whose coherence is based on being alike while sharp distinctions ward off everything and everyone seen as different and outside of the nation/family structure. The role of mass media was crucial in the propagation and spread of this pattern among an increasing number of individuals who would then imitate it. So, for Edward Steichen’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibit, the question was how one could conceptualize an exhibition that strengthened a democratic and liberal spirit.
The role of the mass media for the creation and support of the authoritarian mind was hotly debated at the time. Scholars wondered if mass media could also be used towards the creation of a democratic, tolerant and plural personality which brought the question whether there was something intrinsic to a given mass medium, such as the radio, that catered to a deindividualized totalitarian mindset. How could mass media be used to promote a democratic character? This question applied to countries such as Germany with a recent history of totalitarianism, but it also concerned the US as a society riven by the severe problems of racism and class inequality. In this context, Turner points out, the Museum of Modern Art took on the role of a forum for democratic initiative and debate. Steichen’s The Road to Victory (1942) was a first successful exhibition using the Bauhaus installation technique that came to characterize The Family of Man, and Turner can demonstrate how this show’s particular make-up compels viewers to perform a high degree of agency during their visit to the show.5 The stress on individual agency, the argument ran, foils tendencies towards a totalitarian personality, enhancing instead an individualized and largely self-determined viewing and evaluating process. Even when viewers see photographs of people unlike themselves, such as the African family, they can identify a more structural likeness because of the basic similarity in family structure. Thus, Turner concludes, the show ‘solicited empathy’, making it impossible to develop strict differentiations based on ‘unlikeness’ that easily leads to an authoritarian mindset, especially when supported by mass mediated totalitarian propaganda.6
Turner’s striking analysis repeatedly turns to the eminent role of the installation design without providing an in-depth discussion of the design itself. Turner even identifies the particular design of the exhibition space as a desideratum in scholarly criticism when he points out that the ‘manner of their [the photographs’] installation at MoMA goes largely unanalyzed’.7 He includes the design scheme into his article to some degree but his discussion is geared towards a different goal, namely the analysis of a Cold War politics of attention. Mary Anne Staniszewski provides an excellent and detailed description of the original installation design, but seems less interested in theorizing the role of space and place for the design.8 But the spatial and platial aesthetics of the exhibition are, as I will argue, of paramount importance for its continuing success, and in the following I shall propose a theoretical framework to read the significance of place and space for this particular exhibit.
Turner’s more positive reading of The Family of Man seems to strike a chord in more general terms as it echoes a recently regained popularity and appreciation of Steichen’s exhibit after decades of critical if not dismissive evaluations. This criticism was often harsh, capitalizing for the most part on the show’s purportedly reactionary presentation of a triumphant, Western, heteronormative narrative that posited a universal human condition. This let the exhibit seem dated and rather biased to many viewers and scholars alike. In contrast to this vein of criticism, my investigation will focus on the particular arrangement, the ‘placement’ of the exhibit’s photographs, arguing especially that the highly innovative and daring aesthetic design of the exhibition space let The Family of Man appear as an example of the progressive humanism that Barthes had seen so critically in his evaluation of the exhibit. I will demonstrate how the installation design of the 1955 show in MoMA, on which my chapter concentrates, as well as the present installation at Clervaux, engage the viewer in active, dynamic and relational modes of perception, experience and thought that thwart challenges of monolithic sentimentality. In order to substantiate my claim, the construction and arrangement of the exhibition space, the single and group placements of the photographic material as well as the design of the place as a whole, will be discussed in light of recent theories of the philosophy of place. Drawing on the work of philosophers Jeff Malpas, Edward Casey and Donald Davidson, I will develop a conceptual framework for a critical reading of the exhibition’s aesthetics of place and use this framework for an analytical walk through The Family of Man. Finally, my chapter will propose ways in which Steichen’s show responds to, and actively enhances, a renewed and more general interest in the old idea of humanism that is, by Steichen’s platial design, presented as related, dynamic and progressive.
Seen from a historical perspective, Steichen’s exhibit draws on a variety of precursors in American literary and cultural practice who have attempted to collect the world and gather the human family: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, for example, with its endless catalogues listing as many different people, occupations, places, emotions as possible. Like the single leaves of grass that make up a lawn or meadow, Whitman saw the human family as an egalitarian entity consisting of individuals that nevertheless form a nation, or human family.9 Despite Whitman’s rather blatant focus on the individual leaf of grass, that is, the ‘I’, and despite his exuberant praise of America as the greatest country, he programmatically makes an effort of drawing the whole world into his major work. As is true for Whitman, The Family of Man seems to speak to the same fundamental human concern, that is, to collect, embrace, the family of humankind, and, as I argue, this remains of great relevance to this day. The huge body of scholarly analysis that has been devoted to this singular exhibition, the unimaginable number of catalogues sold and the millions of viewers who have seen the show all testify to The Family of Man’s continuing importance.10 The editors of the present volume identify one of their major goals as the exploration of new ways in which the epochal exhibition can remain relevant for twenty-first-century challenges. So rather than being a mere addition to an already exhaustive body of secondary studies, this collection asks for a new assessment and exploration into the possible meanings that this highly contested, but also incredibly popular photographic project could have in store for contemporary artistic and social practices. During a trip to Clervaux with graduate students, I noticed that this younger audience was neither appalled by a supposedly reactionary sentimentalism nor put off by the unrestrained Cold War propaganda; what mattered to them was the show’s overall objective: to assemble and present humanity. What was true for the small group of students seems to express a larger trend as well: a renewed interest in The Family of Man arguably echoes a revitalization of the idea of humanism that has ostensibly gained momentum in the recent past. This may come as a surprise in times that have, more often than not, been labelled as ‘posthuman’.
Granted that The Family of Man is an example of Cold War propaganda, selling the American dream, some have even called it ‘hard-core propaganda’.11 Its blatant political agenda is clear, as is the intention to persuade. It had a clear-cut religious message as there were hardly any references to non-Christian sacred writing, with the exception of the Bhagavad Gita, as has been frequently pointed out. Other non-Western sources were either secular, or borrowed from folk knowledge or mythic traditions. This ‘camera testament’, as Sandburg had famously called The Family of Man, hardly left any doubts that humanity was basically patriarchal, heterosexual and informed by values and ideas that we would today identify with typical 1950s middle-class American life.12 But the show can also be seen from a different vantage point, as Turner’s emphasis on a contextual reading leads him to conclude:
But at one of the most gender-conservative, race-sensitive and hyper militarized moments in American history, The Family of Man presented a three-dimensional environment in which Americans were asked to accept practitioners of alternative sexuality (polygamy) and members of routinely demonized groups (Africans, Japanese, and Communist Russians and Chinese) as people like themselves. And they were asked to reject warfare as a crime against the species.13
The perspective that the show is far less conservative when seen against the background of a fairly conservative decade in American culture has probably been neglected in recent scholarship and criticism. After all, the show’s immense and unbroken popularity testifies to the fact that it must have struck a chord in its 1955 audience and in audiences all over the world ever since.14 As a colleague pointed out the other day, the book catalogue of The Family of Man was at a time more widely circulated than the phone book.
The Philosophy of Place and Steichen’s Installation Design
My chapter has very little to do with the catalogue of the exhibition, but it has all to do with the original design of the place, of the exhibition space, in light of more recent theories developed by the so-called philosophy of place. In other words, what makes The Family of Man interesting for a contemporary audience, and for contemporary artistic practice, is its installation design.15 The current exhibit in Luxemburg emulates the original design to a high degree, and the exhibit’s success seems to underline that this was a correct curatorial decision. The exhibition tells the story of ‘the family of man’, of humankind, in terms of a linear tale, a ‘folktale’,16 but the tale is a three-dimensional walk-through with a strong emphasis on the integration of the spectator. The spectator is compelled by the story’s formal design to actively integrate and participate in that story. The Family of Man is a picture sequence modified as an environment. It has often been pointed out that the installation strategy was taken from advertising, as the exhibition’s co-designer Paul Rudolph (Steichen and Rudolph worked on the design together) was greatly influenced by Herbert Bayer who, like Steichen, had worked in advertising and had created advertisements for corporate clients. Both were trained in methods to capture and persuade a mass audience. Bayer especially is known for believing that installation methods could be adjusted to achieve any goal, be it ‘enlightenment, advertising, education’.17 The gallery was seen as a dynamic physical space that was determined, in form and structure, by the idea to activate and engage the human beings moving through it. Some 40 years after the first show, the Family’s designer, Paul Rudolph, reflects the idea of the exhibition design:
The Family of Man was a very important thing for me because I had never really considered the idea of heightening the experience that one has in an exhibition in relation to what the exhibition is intended to say and tell […] Exhibition design can deal very much with storytelling, unlike architecture. I was fascinated with the idea of the psychology of space and what could be manipulated in purely architectural terms, by this I mean space and light, vistas, space, color, and sequence.18
The notion of the ‘psychology of space’ implies a sense of activation, meaning that space can be designed to actively work towards a particular intention. An exhibition can function as a space for an intense, ‘heightened’ experience that the designer was well aware of. The particular design of an exhibition space, the platial arrangement of the photographs, is hence of considerable importance for the show’s effect. For me, it is especially the treatment of place that is of paramount importance in order to make this exhibition relevant for a twenty-first-century audience. So I would like to offer a more detailed reading of the place, or, to be precise, the conceptualization of place, the place of the photos in relation to their viewers. For this purpose, I propose to read the exhibit in light of the concept of philosophical topography as developed by the eminent philosopher of place Jeff Malpas, who has, together with Edward S. Casey and a few other scholars, produced a rich body of theoretical ruminations on the philosophical idea and significance of place as a key category of human experience. Without going into too much philosophical detail, allow me a brief sketch of the basic mode and elements of topographic philosophy according to Malpas.
In much scholarship on the notions of space and place, there is a tendency towards a rather careless use of the terms, treating one as inclusive of the other and vice versa. Some theorists have produced more nuanced distinctions between both terms (e.g. Casey), while yet other theorists, such as Doreen Massey, reject the difference altogether in quite considered argumentation. The differentiation between space and place has perhaps never been entirely clear, as both concepts are intricately related to one another, and neither has it been unchanging. Malpas’s clarification as put forth in his essay ‘Thinking Topographically: Place, Space, and Geography’ will serve as a basis for my discussion of the role of space and place in The Family of Man. For Malpas, space implies ‘openness, expansiveness, and “room”’.19 Seen this way, space is closely tied to the void, to nothingness and expanse. Space veers toward regularity, homogeneity and uniformity, and as it has an underlying structure, Malpas thinks it can be measured and is quantifiable. He resorts to the term’s etymology, reminding us that via the Latin spatium or the Greek stadium, the term carries a sense of the ‘measurable distance or interval’. Place, by comparison, is specified as being bound and related to a sense of limit and surface (seen as a limit): ‘topos’, Malpas writes, ‘is a boundary or bounding surface’. As in the Greek chora, place appears in terms of contemporary ideas of place as a ‘locus of meaning, memory, identity’ (Malpas). In this sense, place can be seen as having character and content and is thus defined, in contrast to space, by qualitative aspects. As a consequence of the qualitative aspect of place, places are heterogeneous, they contain differences and can on these grounds be differentiated from other places.
This differentiation brings the notion of ‘relationality’ into the picture, as places necessarily related to one another: ‘No place exists except in relation to other places! And every place contains other places that are related within it’ (Malpas). What is characteristic of a given place is an aspect that emerged as a consequence of the relation, and not the separation, between different places. The activity of ‘mapping’ exemplifies this relationship. In order to explain the condition, Malpas describes the work of a traditional cartographer before the times of aerial surveying. What was important for the work of traditional cartography was the bodily engagement of the cartographer with the landscape, as the body had to move in and relate to the environment in order to perform the task of surveying it.
Malpas acknowledges that space and place are related, not exclusively because of the linguistic and historical bonds between both concepts. Place, he points out, implies the sense of openness, expansiveness and room that is constitutive of space and that he had earlier identified as being central to space. Place hence becomes a ‘sort of opened space’, but one that does have a limit. The ‘bounded space of a place’ is intricately connected to time and is not static but ‘essentially dynamic’, as boundaries in general are dynamic constructs. So, according to Malpas, the sense of place is characterized by the three following features: ‘First, place as bound and ground; second, place as open and dynamic; third, place as relational and superficial. These elements of place are the basis for the idea of a philosophical topography’ (Malpas).
Malpas’s conclusion is that place is central to understanding human being; he sees it as providing the frame for all human appearance that we can then study. Human being is determined by and, according to Malpas, even ‘founded in place’; in other words, it is ‘placed’ (Malpas). But this placedness retains an important and notable openness, dynamics and indeterminacy in which the human can appear and act. Taking the relationality back into the picture, human identity is related to the ‘identity of places in which human lives are embedded’ (Malpas). The topographic is thus a key element in the form of the human, and as it is dynamic it shapes and keeps shaping the individual and connective subjectivities in a given bounded space. This way of thinking puts the processual and the productive at the centre of attention, which Malpas underscores when he resorts to Heidegger who wrote that ‘a boundary is not that at which something stops but […] that from which something begins its presencing’ (Malpas). This productivity encompasses the notion of place itself, not just the boundary. But importantly, boundaries are established as dynamic, and as connecting rather than separating. Thus, a given place always admits the other, the different, the new.
The sense of interrelation was theorized by Donald Davidson in his work on triangulation, where he conceived of the idea that the topographical field is formed by the relatedness of the single elements within it, and can only be understood by the ‘mapping’ of this relatedness (Malpas). In Donaldson, this mutual relation figures as the relatedness between self, other and thing. So, any place can only be understood if one understands the relations between the elements in a processual, dynamic way.20
In this sense, we can only gain access to a certain place, area or region by being at a certain place within it. Only our own ‘being placed’ opens up a region, a world. So, the visitor to The Family of Man enters the bounded space, seen as open and relational, and by the particular design of the exhibition that I will describe below, I argue, what is strengthened is precisely the relational function within the place between viewer, viewed and the world in between.
The spatial design of the exhibit can be seen as a pronounced engagement with issues of space and place. Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer was initially faced with a prologue of images that each expressed a sense of timelessness and eternal conditions. Among them was a telescope photograph of Orion, then a naked child lying on the ground of what looks like an ancient forest, followed by a picture of a tribeswoman coupled with a mask from the Ice Age. Opposite the entrance was a photomural showing a river flowing into the ocean shown together with a picture of a pregnant woman’s torso (see illustration 35). One of the captions read ‘And God said, let there be light, Genesis 1.3’. The flow of water served as a metaphor for the flow of human life, but also as a sense of the stream of visitors passing through the exhibition space and, by analogy, through a vision of humanity – a narrative flow as well.
Passing through the entrance way, the visitor was framed by photos of masses of people as if humanity was assembled as a crowd of people whose individual faces were almost unidentifiable in the picture (see illustration 36). The large-scale photo was presented at the beginning of the exhibit as if the viewer were invited to join in the crowd and place herself among the multitude of people on earth. At the entrance, next to the landscape in China, was the tiny photo of a Peruvian flute player by Eugene V. Harris that featured in much of the publicity materials of the exhibit.
35 The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
To the right of the Chinese landscape was a transparent wall structure letting the viewer see a panorama of the exhibition as a whole. On the transparent wall were pictures of lovers, of weddings, and the like. So, a viewer was confronted with a plane of pictures, in front of a deep-space view of the rest of the exhibition and, if you will, the ‘rest’ of humankind. Behind every scene of marriage were deep histories of the people in their relations to yet other people, this particular order seemed to say. This mixture of solids and voids on a surface, in addition to doublings of picture surfaces that can be viewed simultaneously, comes close to a multilayered investigation into the stories and experiences of humankind, by compelling the viewer to investigate the relations between single scenes and moments presented on individual photographs in relation to herself and other viewers that she would see.
Steichen, with the help of Rudolph, used a wide variety of forms in his concept of exhibition design. He seemed to play with forms, choosing circles, squares, rectangles or hemispheres as formal structures, according to which he arranged the exhibit. The formal structure of the display also affected the viewer as she walked through the space. If the items on display were arranged as a circle, the visitor, too, was inclined to see the pictures in a given sequence in space that could be meaningful for the reception of the photos. In addition to the use of different geometrical shapes, Steichen and Rudolph notably made use of transparent or semi-transparent background structures. Some pictures at the start of the exhibition were hung on a wall made of transparent lucite, thus allowing the viewer a peek to the larger exhibition space. Other photographs, such as the panel showing an older and a younger couple on each side, were hung from the ceiling. In the original installation, this panel could even be swung by the viewer like the swing that was presented.21 This hanging technique hence encouraged active viewer participation. Walking through the exhibit, one would also have noticed the particular lighting design, carefully developed to highlight certain pictures or perspectives while leaving others in darker areas. The lighting acted as a further guide through the exhibit, enforcing some views while discouraging others. The installation design was a path through the exhibit, a path that left, however, room for individual detours. These detours were shapes that let the viewer wander around exhibits, turn about to look at the other side of a panel, bowing down to look at a photograph on the lower side of a wall, or looking way up, coming closer to a picture of smaller size. The picture arrangement hence encouraged, even demanded, a range of bodily movements from the attentive spectator, hence involving the spectator in a most active intellectual and bodily sense. The entire body had to respond to the exhibit, and it was not principally, or exclusively, an intellectual stimulation. Even though the exhibit basically laid out a prescribed path for the viewer, the play with forms and the occasional detours described above lent the exhibit a little bit of an air of a maze through which the viewer had to wander.
The centrepiece of The Family of Man, the photographs of families from Sicily, Japan, Bechuanaland and the United States (see illustration 2), is a good case in point. The photos were enlarged, double-sided and duplicated in a particular arrangement that in fact resembled a sculpture rather than a traditional two-dimensional photography exhibit. The viewer was encouraged to look at the pictures from a variety of perspectives: one would walk around them and turn around to see the other side of the photograph. The photographs were arranged as if one would walk around the families, see them from all sides and eventually project oneself as well as other viewers of the exhibition into the family arrangements. In the manner of a detective, the viewer could look for doubles of the families within the arrangement, trying to study the structural principle and find out more about its design. In her description of this particular installation, Staniszewski perceptively notes that the design lets the viewers ‘virtually embrace’ the families.22 That the floor in the original design was made of pebbles added a very distinct bodily sensation to it. In other words, the viewer was fully immersed in the families from different parts of the globe.
The viewer entered into a triangular relation and the resulting sense of immersion triggered the feeling of empathy with the families. This emotional power was noted in a 1955 review of The Family of Man by photographer Barbara Morgan who described the mechanism thus:
In comprehending the show the individual himself is also enlarged, for these photographs are not photographs only – they are also phantom images of our co-citizens; this woman into whose photographic eyes I now look is perhaps today weeding her family’s rice paddy, or boiling a fish in coconut milk. Can you look at the polygamist family group and imagine the different norms that make them live happily in their society which is so unlike – yet like – our own? Empathy with these hundreds of human being truly expands our sense of values.23
The space of the exhibition as a relational, dynamic and processual place supports identification with the people in the pictures, Morgan’s ‘phantom images of our co-citizens’. The viewer looks at the people in the pictures, who are at the same time like herself as well as unlike herself, and can still see them as enlargements of her own self.
A similar full immersion was likely to occur in the ring-around-the-rosy arrangement of pictures of children at play (see illustration 38). The visitors walked around the pictures of children, then also looking at other visitors looking at the display vis-à-vis one’s own position in the circle. The particular platial arrangement almost threw the viewer into a situation of actually playing ‘ring around the rosy’ with the other viewers who are put into the same position by the formal display of the pictures. Form, once again, was key in expressing what the photos are about.
Photographs were hence installed in myriad platial arrangements, ranging from a more traditional placement on a solid wall structure at eye level through placement above the visitor’s head or towards the bottom of the wall, to dynamic layouts that involved the spectator’s whole body. A further important effect of this layout was a certain pace that it encouraged: as the viewer was put into different viewing situations, forcing particular bodily connections with the items on display, the show would speed up the viewing process, throw the viewer into ring-around-the-rosy chases, and thus had a certain tempo at different sections of the show. The rate of viewing a certain number of pictures per time unit was largely determined by the spatial positioning of the pictures, whether one dominated a whole room or whether several were positioned in a helter-skelter arrangement in one and the same spot.
36 The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
37 The Family of Man installation at Clervaux Castle. Theme ‘Learning, thinking, teaching, ring-around-the-rosy-stand, human relations and death’.
The importance of the show’s spatial arrangement is highlighted in the death section of the exhibit as well. Here, the spectator passed through a narrow alley-like space in which both sides showed pictures of funerals, graveyards and people in sorrow and mourning. At the far end of the passage was a large-size photomural of a busy Fifth Avenue crowd. Walking toward the picture of the crowd, the viewer would turn left and see, once again at the very end of the passage, a photo of the altar room of a church suffused with light on the crucifix as centrepiece. The show would repeatedly open up such vistas, offering views of different scenes, often thematically suggestive ones, and hence encouraging the viewer to make respective connections by entering into the relational, dynamic place.
In stark contrast to the printed catalogue of The Family of Man, the exhibition showed the photos of middle-aged and older couples, each accompanied by the caption ‘We two form a multitude’, as mounted on the photomural of UN delegates (see Frontispiece). In the original installation, the picture of the couples were attached at right angles to the picture of the assembly as a whole, thus adding depth and perspective to the exhibit. By comparison, the catalogue of The Family of Man, as Sandeen notes, ‘flattened the presentation to two dimensions’ as the picture of the couples are simply printed on a different page.24 The explicit triangular layout forces the viewer to relate to the presentation of the multitude of political representatives as well as the examples of ‘twos’ forming that multitude. A dynamic relationship between viewer, representatives and couples as well as other viewers in the room is hence enforced, encouraging the reader to reflect on the lives of the couples on display as well as her own and that of others while also focusing on the mechanisms of political organizations that abstractly express and direct those lives. The juxtaposition between single viewer, abstract political entity and other individuals living lives around the globe as does the viewer of the exhibit puts the viewer in the same position as the many couples that make up the people on earth that the UN, in turn, represents.
The final section of The Family of Man shows numerous pictures of happy children (see illustration 38). That may, in itself, be considered a rather flat ending for an exhibition that catered to easily palatable mass tastes anyway. But what is interesting is, once again, the innovative and persuasive layout of this section. The photographs were mounted on poles in a seemingly pell-mell, disorganized arrangement, and the walls of this section were originally painted in tones of pink. The Family of Man designer Rudolph was well aware of the trouble with ending an exhibit such as this one: ‘How to end the show was a difficult thing. You couldn’t end with the atom bomb. It was about the idea of childhood and was about rebirth. It was done in pink, warm color. It was light.’25 It is plain to see that such choices let the exhibit appear as naive, if not outright conservative, and as given to nostalgia as critical judgement. But regardless of differences in personal taste, the design of the place and its explicit multi-directionality make The Family of Man a daring and intellectually stimulating enterprise. Especially in this last section, photos were displayed in the manner of street signs pointing in different, also opposing directions, thus paying homages to all corners of the world and all the turns that lives could take. Some point towards the viewer, addressing him or her directly; for others, again, one needs to move around in order to see. The viewer, and hence history at any given moment of viewing, is actively called upon. And, as Rudolph rightly says, it was light that was speaking directly to people’s sensory system – a design of immersion.
38 The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
One could easily imagine other ways of addressing and immersing the spectator, for instance by choosing other, more problematic topics. As is general knowledge by now, the photograph of a lynched African American man was taken down after the opening of the show,26 hence sparing the spectator the overt racism rampant in contemporary US society. Repeatedly, mirror-like arrangements have been pointed out as a central design pattern in The Family of Man,27 but I would argue that the installation design is not about the simple reflection in terms of a one-on-one correspondence; rather, the show enhances a multi-directional dialogical structure in complex triangular relationships that induce the participatory, or connective, character of the thus designed place.
Such interconnective aspects have been pointed out, in slightly different terms, by Siegfried Kracauer, who argues in his Theory of Film (1960) that The Family of Man foregrounded an ‘emancipatory intercultural communication’.28 Even the smallest similarities that are made visible and the shared experience of visiting the exhibit produce a social fabric that enhances communication and that has elsewhere been called a virtual ‘iconography of emotion’.29 This design primarily serves as an enabler for connection, both between viewer and photograph as well as in between single viewers. Steichen’s everyday archive enforces triangulation between viewer, exhibit and other viewers, and even if what is on display is basically lifeless objects, these assume a ‘life of their own’ in the connective environment and thus work as active promoters of relations that each viewer is continuously asked to make by the exhibition design. In a recent interview, Bruno Latour connects the human and the non-human world, stressing the abundance of relations that each item, each ‘object’, brings up in terms similar to those created by The Family of Man’s design:
Things are not objects. In fact, they are precisely the opposite of objects. When we are focused on things, we are actually also focused on ourselves. When I am focusing on the attachment of this coffee cup, I am actually getting back to myself quite fast, as well as to the entire history of Italian coffee-making, the people who are harvesting the coffee, etc. This cup of coffee is an assembly.30
Conclusion: A Humanism of Relation in Place
A focus on place has often been associated with a rather conservative, if not reactionary ideology, suggesting a sense of ‘Heimat’ that has unfortunately been key to Nazi or, more generally, totalitarian politics. In stark contrast, the focus on place in recent and contemporary theory in the wake of the spatial turn treats place as productive, dynamic and processual. The platial design of The Family of Man is, as I have tried to show, key to a more democratic reading of this millennial exhibit and to a more positive evaluation of the show in terms of a progressive humanism. In his famous critique, Roland Barthes presented The Family of Man as a rather deplorable, reactionary piece of sentimental humanism.31 Barthes explicitly brings up the well-known case of Emmett Till, the young African American who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14, and he asks the provocative question of why not ask Till’s parents what they thought of ‘The Great Family of Man’?32 When mentioning Emmett Till, Barthes correctly reminds us of the severe problems that the show ostensibly left out. The insistence of the similarity of supposedly universal human categories of experience, such as, for example, birth, love, marriage, death and so on, paper over the more diverse and historically contingent experiences of humankind. He calls for a ‘progressive humanism’ that, as I have proposed, lies precisely in the reading of The Family of Man’s design in terms of the philosophy of place. The platial design of the exhibit lays bare a dynamic and inherently relational sense of place that supports a progressive kind of humanism. Put differently, the dynamic, bodily involvement of the viewer, the powerful integration of viewer into triangular relationships of perception and recognition, continually changes ‘the family of man’, making room for history as each viewer interacts with the photographs presented and thus truly may constitute a dynamic, critical and relational family of humankind. This exhibition, perhaps more than any other, is a participatory archive; it encourages, by design, the continual creation and recreation of a three-dimensional map of the world, a cartographic space, dependent on each viewer entering the bounded space of the place. Thus, this may well be seen as a humanism of a most progressive kind, as each viewer changes the place with the relations that she/he brings along, creates, enforces or colours in a different light. This chimes with Horkheimer’s observation of the high degree of ‘interrelatedness’ that this show triggers, as he wonders how many people have made the ‘link from the pictures on show here to the idea of man or mankind’.
Notes
1 Fred Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America’, Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 81.
2 For critiques of The Family of Man from a variety of perspectives and vantage points, see, for example, Roland Barthes, ‘La grande famille des hommes’, in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 173–6; Christopher Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, October 22 (1982): 27–63; John Berger, ‘Uses of Photography: For Susan Sontag’, in Berger, Understanding a Photograph (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 49–60; Allan Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15–21; and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). For a summary of critical responses, see Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 56, and Monique Berlier, ‘The Family of Man: Readings of an Exhibition’, in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennan and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 206–41.
3 Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’, 100, 101.
4 Cf. Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 57, 62–4.
5 Cf. Gerd Hurm’s chapter in this collection for the section on Steichen’s early exhibition designs. As Hurm shows, Steichen’s efforts as a modernist curator preceded Bauhaus installations, thus he corrects the misleading impression in secondary studies that the modernist design of The Family of Man was superimposed on Steichen’s rather naive understanding of photographic montage.
6 Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 78.
7 Ibid., 61.
8 See Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation Design at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), chap. 4.
9 One of the possible sources for the title, The Family of Man, was Sandburg’s Whitmanesque 1936 poem ‘The People, Yes’. See Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 43–4.
10 For a detailed overview of numbers and data relevant to the exhibition, see, e.g., John Szarkowski, ‘The Family of Man.’ The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 12–37, and Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, esp. ch. 2.
11 Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 221.
12 The Sandburg quote is from his ‘Prologue’ to Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Maco Publishing and the Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 5.
13 Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 83.
14 See Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, esp. chs 4 and 5.
15 In terms of the original installation design of The Family of Man, I rely on Mary Anne Staniszewski’s description of it in The Power of Display, on Eric Sandeen’s presentation in Picturing an Exhibition as well as on personal conversations with Eric Sandeen for which I am very grateful.
16 Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 210.
17 Quoted in Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 220.
18 Ibid., 238.
19 Jeff Malpas, ‘Thinking Topographically: Place, Space, and Geography’, http://jeffmalpas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Thinking-Topographically-Place-Space-and-Geography.pdf (accessed 2 December 2016). All further references are given in the text as ‘Malpas’.
20 Jeff Malpas, ‘Triangulation and Philosophy: A Davidsonian Landscape’, in Triangulation from an Epistemological Point of View, ed. Maria Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer (Frankfurt et al.: Ontos Verlag, 2011), 257–79; J. E. Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. chs 3, 4.
21 Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 241.
22 Ibid.
23 Quoted in Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 82.
24 Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 86.
25 Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 249.
26 E.g., Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 251.
27 Notably, a mirror was part of the original show. It was taken away by Steichen and Miller two weeks after the show’s opening because they believed it was ‘corny and wrong’. See Turner, ‘The Family of Man’, 80; Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 244, and others.
28 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 310.
29 Janine Marchessault, ‘Manufacturing Humanism: Steichen/Burtynsky’, Prefix Photo 15 (2007): 57.
30 Quoted in Marchessault, ‘Manufacturing Humanism’, 66–7.
31 See Gerd Hurm’s encompassing discussion of Barthes’s reading of the show in this volume.
32 Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’, 101. Italics in the original.