The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age

Steichen does invite Barthes’s response to some degree, especially if we take him at his word in introducing the printed version. The exhibition, he says, ‘was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world’.² But on the next page Steichen complicates things by affirming that the ‘mirror’, if that’s what it is, shows us not simply harmony and beauty but also ‘the stupid and destructive things’ people have done to the environment.³ In any case, the content of the exhibition makes an argument that goes far beyond Steichen’s ingratiating introduction, establishing a normative discourse that attempts to persuade us of how we must act in the world and providing the premise for a vision of global amity. Perhaps, as Barthes alleges, Steichen suppresses the ‘weight of History’ that has created cultural difference; but from another perspective, the entire concept of The Family of Man is historical: its rationale is the new historical fact of the hydrogen bomb, and it is arguing that the ‘differences’ we assume to exist can explode us and our world.

42 From the pages of Life Magazine, 3 May 1954, pp. 54–5. It was the smaller of the two images seen here that was used in the exhibition at MoMA.

Steichen’s argument, we might say, is addressed to the ‘common man’ and rests on the utopian premise, articulated by Rousseau, that the general will informs and legitimizes the power of the state. That is the argument that Max Horkheimer implicitly adopts when he reads the exhibition as an experience that draws us into the shared lives of our fellow human beings, allowing us to identify with the persons in the images that we see – except for the very few images of barbarism, from which Horkheimer assumes we must recoil.⁴ For Horkheimer, the logic of the exhibition supports the argument that to the extent that goodwill is shared and promoted and barbarism rejected, mankind will secure a more peaceful future.

Horkheimer makes no mention in his response to the exhibition in Germany of the hydrogen bomb image, which in the original Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show was a back-lit colour transparency, mural-sized, occupying its own niche (see illustration 42). (In travelling versions, which I’ll discuss later, a large black-and-white image was used (see illustration 43).) The bomb, I would argue, is the central image in the exhibition, the lynchpin of Steichen’s argument. Steichen is saying not simply, we must love good and reject evil. He is saying, we must love good and reject evil – or else. ‘Or else’ means in this case that we risk another war, which would be, given our atomic weapons, the final war, the war of total destruction. Of course one might read the giant luminous bomb image as a Cold War threat as well, a warning to the rest of the world, a warning to our ‘enemies’, that we’ve got the power to kill you. But that power to kill is also suicidal, for the bomb is a threat to all mankind, not just the enemy. (By the 1950s, nuclear weapons were already proliferating beyond the United States.) If the bomb is used, then the perceived differences represented in The Family of Man – between rich and poor, first world and developing world, city and farm, scientist and hunter – will be erased, not by love but by death. And that of course is a possibility that has crossed the mind of more than one dystopian novelist.

But leaving aside the ‘real world’ of politics and war and considering The Family of Man on its own terms, as a work of popular art that is at the same time didactic, I want to propose that we consider the exhibition as a Cold War pastoral, a photographic narrative that represents an idyllic – albeit cyclical – view of human experience, leading us to the climax of the exhibition: the hydrogen bomb. The bomb intrudes upon the idyll, threatening to destroy the cycles of life and death: in that sense, the logic and structure of the exhibition call to mind one variant of the pastoral genre, in which the fact of death – often in the form of a death’s head or a tomb discovered in the wilderness – is intruded upon the otherwise bucolic scene of shepherds and shepherdesses. In fact, looking at the colour image of the bomb used by Steichen, one might indeed think of it as a death’s head: the skull-like form, the curved glowing dome of a head, the line of glowing ‘teeth’. Whether or not we perceive the bomb blast as a skull, it functions metaphorically like a death’s head, an emblem of destruction. In effect, the MoMA exhibition is a walk-through pastoral, which we can subtitle Et in Arcadia Ego, and we the viewers are the shepherds who are strolling through this world that we think we understand, until we encounter a sight that stops us dead.

The iconography of the Arcadian skull goes back at least to Guercino’s painting, Et in Arcadia Ego (1618–22), in which the shepherds come across a death’s head in a wooded area and stare at it pensively. The skull is perched on a stone pedestal with the inscription Et in Arcadia Ego, and we take it that the rustics are being reminded that even in the rural paradise of forest and glen, there is death, as if the skull might be saying, ‘I too am in Arcadia.’ The implication is usually taken as a moralistic one – along the lines of the Vanitas theme, warning the shepherds of the vanity of earthly pleasures. Poussin painted the theme twice – in 1627 and in 1637 – and it is the earlier version that sustains the Guercino notion of the speaking death’s head. (A later version, showing shepherds contemplating a tomb with the same inscription, but no skull, is often taken as the ‘voice’ of the dead person in the sarcophagus, who is saying, ‘I too have lived in Arcady’, a more elegiac tone perhaps but still a warning that death comes to all.)⁵

But importantly, Steichen’s purpose is not to reproduce the familiar sentiments of Arcadian iconography; he doesn’t want to say merely, let’s not forget death. In fact, a good deal of the imagery in The Family of Man already incorporates death and suffering: calling the exhibition an Arcadian idyll interrupted by the hydrogen bomb does not do justice to the fulness of life and death (hunger, war, violence, not to mention natural causes) that is a part of the story Steichen is telling. The bomb/skull is not warning us away from earthly pleasures, nor is it enjoining us to seek them while there is still time. And if there is a place for religion and spiritual belief in The Family of Man, the point is not to offer God as the ‘answer’ to the human dilemma we have created for ourselves. Rather, it is warning us that we may be so colossally stupid as to bring death on ourselves, as opposed to suffering the inevitable and universal fate: we may destroy the world entirely, through the force of our great hydrogen bomb. And that is a different message from the seventeenth-century pastoral, a more political message surely and also a more existential message, saying in effect that the future (life or death) is in our collective hands. We have only to make sure our governments don’t pull the trigger.

I have been discussing The Family of Man until now, as if it is one thing. But that is not the case: in addition to the MoMA exhibition, the ur-version, we also have the many versions of the show that travelled the world, with slightly varied content. What the travelling exhibits shared, however, is the absence of the colour hydrogen bomb image that is the central and climactic point in the MoMA show. Instead, at best, they used a black-and-white version of the bomb cloud, an image that is not as pictorially shocking as the colour image in MoMA (see illustration 43). Incidentally, the travelling show bomb is not a black-and-white version of the colour image; rather it is an image taken at a different moment in the November 1952 detonation of ‘Ivy Mike’ over Enewetak, and probably a more dramatic photograph – in the medium of black and white – than the colour image would have been if it had been printed in black and white. But if the exhibition versions of The Family of Man have their differences, we need to put them all collectively against the book version of the show. In the book version, we actually have no image of the hydrogen bomb at all – a point I will return to. The one exception to that statement is the special edition published in 1955 with an appendix portfolio of Ezra Stoller’s installation photos. In that portfolio – offered as a footnote photograph – is an image not by Stoller but by Wayne Miller, a black-and-white snapshot that does contain the original H-bomb photo from MoMA.

My argument in what follows has two parts. First, I want to read The Family of Man through the lens of the new consciousness that was born in the post-war era – the possible total destruction of human life that was emblematized in the H-bomb. In the second part of my discussion, I argue that the original show at the Museum of Modern Art and the book version of the exhibition that followed it are significantly different: the absence of the hydrogen bomb photograph, even a black-and-white version, produces an argument that is muted, almost to the point of vanishing.

If, as I am arguing, the hydrogen bomb photograph chosen by Steichen for the original exhibition is the key to understanding what The Family of Man was about, we must observe that it was even more significant by virtue of what it was not: the H-bomb explosion was not the familiar mushroom cloud but was instead a more threatening form, a mountainous cloud – red, yellow and orange – with darker horizontal bands across the central form, set against a black sky. I have called it a skull/bomb. To understand Steichen’s choice and to understand the impact the bomb photo was intended to have in the exhibition, we must first step back and explore the way nuclear weapons were understood by the general public in the ten years between the destruction of Japan’s two cities and the mounting of The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art.

43 The Family of Man installation at Clervaux Castle. Theme ‘H-bomb explosion’. Atomic Energy Commission.

Although the hydrogen bomb had been exploded experimentally in 1952, it was not seen by the public as a visual event until 1954. Up to 1954, when people thought of nuclear weapons, they were thinking of the old atomic bomb, which they had already absorbed into their experience of the exotic, so that the old mushroom cloud was almost a familiar friend. (Bikini, the site of nuclear tests beginning in 1946, gave us the name of our abbreviated bathing suits.) We can see the way the image of the bomb explosion over Nagasaki was cocooned within an aesthetic of the sublime, including its contradictions of terror and beauty, in the writings of journalist William Laurence, who was the first to describe it. For Laurence, the sight is monstrous and frightening, but also sublime, a shifting cloud of organic forms – mushrooms and flowers. Laurence was commissioned by the US Army to accompany the aeroplane crews observing the drop and to report on what he saw – the only journalist to have official permission to do so. In a piece published by Life magazine, Laurence described the unfolding clouds ‘struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed […] But no sooner did this happen when another mushroom, smaller in size than the first one, began emerging out of the pillar. It was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head.’⁶ Despite the menacing forms of the mushroom cloud, Laurence saw it finally as a visual wonder – a flower, a rose even: ‘As the first mushroom floated off into the blue, it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles.’⁷

There were other forms of aesthetic appreciation besides the sublime, especially as imagery of nuclear testing began to appear in the mass media. For example, in addition to the abstract kinetic beauty of the mushroom cloud, the desert testing grounds near Alamogordo, New Mexico, were yielding aerial images whose beauty seemed paradoxically to cancel out the explosive horror of the blast: ‘The first atomic bomb’s crater is a great green blossom in the desert near Alamogordo. The lighter splash around the dark center, which was made when the explosion’s heat melted the desert sand, is a layer of glass 2,400 feet across’.⁸ In the same article, a close-up photograph of the crater’s surface reveals abstract biomorphic patterns that look like they would have attracted Edward Weston’s eye; Life’s caption combines both the scientific and the aesthetic response: ‘close-up of crater’s surface shows how the heat of the atomic explosion destroyed a desert plant and melted sand into weird shapes of crude glass’.⁹ Meanwhile, in another image, the radiation from the crater fragments produces a black-and-white film exposure that looks like one of Man Ray’s rayographs.¹⁰ It was as if the modernist aesthetic was the editorial lens through which the bomb was seen.

In other ways as well during the early 1950s the bomb was being assimilated into American culture as almost a ‘natural’ force, more particularly a force that Americans could deal with, almost with aplomb, assuming the US might ever become a target. The US Army Field Forces Chief declared, troops ‘have no particular reason to fear the atomic bomb more than any other weapon’.¹¹ But if troops are used to danger, what about the civilian population? For it was clear, within a few short years of the atom bomb’s explosion, that other countries, and especially the USSR, had the power to destroy American cities, just as the US had the power to destroy theirs. Given this possibility, US citizens had to be ‘prepared’, and nuclear proliferation brought with it the proliferation of nuclear fallout shelters in urban centres of the United States, marked by a special black-and-orange sign, and the construction of personal shelters underground – stocked with canned foods, detective novels and checkered tablecloths – across the rural areas of the United States.

Yet another way the bomb was domesticated was through the plausible fiction of scientific rhetoric, with its measurements of bodily and material damage following a blast. Seven months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of the bomb were described in Life magazine (11 March 1946) in the form of a chilling summary by the US Commission sent to Japan to study the effects of the bomb on buildings and on people. The language was graphic: ‘internal organs were ruptured […] Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled’.¹² In the subsequent pages, Life reported on the effects of heat on the skin (clothing imprinted on the body), of gamma rays (internal bleeding), of shock waves (inner organs rupturing) and on the material damage: frame buildings were smashed to pieces, while steel frame buildings were stripped of their masonry. Yet as gruesome as these details were, they were sanitized by the use of simple drawings that schematized and neutralized the descriptions, turning the horror of reality into something one might see in a high school science textbook.

Talking about the science of the bomb and of nuclear reactors helped distance the average citizen from the horror, and the mass media regularly carried stories dealing with the force of explosions, along with the stop-motion depiction of blasts using high-speed camera techniques. Images like these were spectacular as science and as art and contributed to the American public’s pride in the nation’s technological prowess.¹³

In asking why in 1952 Steichen may have decided to begin the work of creating an exhibition devoted to world peace, we can point to two events in that year: one is the publication of photographs revealing the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; the second is the testing of the hydrogen bomb on Enewetak, an atoll in the Pacific. Only in 1952, following the withdrawal of the US occupying forces and the lifting of the press ban, did images of the destruction of the two original Japanese targets – Hiroshima and Nagasaki – finally reach the general public in the pages of Life.¹⁴ We are talking, just to be clear, about the atomic bomb, not the later hydrogen bomb. In the 29 September issue, Life’s readers were shown the five ghastly photographs taken by Yoshito Matsushige immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima, the only images taken on that day. Matsushige captured the survivors, their clothes shredded, as they huddle together; and in one image a police officer is sitting at a desk issuing certificates – though what purpose they served, except to comfort the survivors through the fiction of a still extant bureaucracy, is hard to imagine. In one image, a dark shadow drapes concrete steps, the putative remains of a pulverized victim.

Life also printed Yosuke Yamahata’s photos of Nagasaki, originally commissioned by the Japanese government immediately after the bomb so that they could be used to reinvigorate the war effort; resisting that intention, the photographer had withheld the inflammatory images, and in the confusion after the atomic bombs and in the weeks before Japan’s surrender, they were forgotten.¹⁵ Taken in the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the photographs show the physical ruins of the blasts – twisted rails, the smoking ruins of buildings, an occasional structure or tree standing here and there – and the suffering of those who survived, usually for a short time only, with torn limbs and severe burns. These previously suppressed images were now visible to both Japanese and American audiences. The Japanese had known the horrifying statistics – 260,000 dead, 160,000 wounded – but the photographs had a stronger impact than any numbers when they were published seven years after the war’s end in Japan: Life tells us they elicited not so much anger against the United States as a strong sentiment against any future wars. The American response to the photographs, to judge from the letters printed by Life, expressed shock and sorrow at the images, but also a sense that the bomb was a necessary evil, in having saved the lives of American soldiers who were about to invade Japan.¹⁶

The second major event of 1952 was the testing of the hydrogen bomb on the Enewetak atoll in the Pacific, and we can assume that Captain Steichen – given his recent service as head of naval photography during the war – was informed of the event. For despite the warnings and premonitions of Time and Life immediately after the bombings of Japan in 1945, not to mention admonitions by many atomic scientists, along with the creation of anti-nuclear war organizations, the years following the end of World War II were marked by the continuing expansion of nuclear testing, above and below ground. It is most important to note the difference in public consciousness that resulted from the advent of the hydrogen bomb, as opposed to the earlier atomic bombs. The destructive power of the atomic bomb was horrifying. But the hydrogen or fusion bomb was in another category altogether, ten times more powerful than the A-bomb, and its destructive power dwarfed the earlier atomic bomb.

Two years after the initial testing of the H-bomb, Life magazine showed the range of its destructive power and the possibility – or rather the impossibility – of evacuating urban population centres in the event of attack. For it was simply impossible to imagine an urban centre surviving, as Life made clear in an article jauntily titled, ‘5–4–3–2–1 and the Hydrogen Age is Upon Us’. With photographs from the 1952 bomb test, released by the US government in 1954, the article makes clear that the hydrogen bomb changes everything, and especially the question of survival: ‘The device which vaporized Elugelab also obliterated all previous plans for US civil defense, which were based on estimates of A-bomb damage.’¹⁷ Instead of total destruction within a radius of one mile (atom bomb), the new weapon destroyed everything within four to five miles, with extensive damage beyond that. Life describes the various plans of major US cities with a straight face, but it’s painfully clear that survival is an impossible dream. Major cities bombed with the H-bomb will be obliterated.

If the advent of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 was the catalyst for Steichen to imagine an exhibition that would address the urgent problem of world peace, The Family of Man did not spring from Steichen’s brow without prior inspiration, antecedent and ancestry. We know that when he saw the 1938 Grand Central Station exhibition of the Farm Security Administration photographs, which pictured the ravages of the Great Depression, the former aesthete and modernist was inspired with a new sense of what photography could do as a public medium. A few years later, while serving as commander of naval photography in World War II, Steichen had mounted an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Road to Victory (1942), that was designed to inspire a vibrant patriotic response; tracing the American character from the westward expansion into ‘virgin land’ (the text was by Carl Sandburg), the exhibition portrayed a nation whose determination and strength were unassailable. A subsequent Steichen exhibition, Power in the Pacific (1945), celebrated the naval might of the United States in the Pacific, where Steichen himself had directed photographic operations.¹⁸ Both of these exhibitions were developing new techniques of pictorial narrative, with Steichen experimenting with picture size, thematic grouping, dramatic sequencing and visual direction; Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer, working in the US since the late 1930s, was a key contributor to the exhibition designs (he had left MoMA by the time of The Family of Man but his influence is still apparent in the exhibition design); The Family of Man was devised by architect Paul Rudolph, whose designs typically inflected modernist simplicity with a complexity that is visible in the floor plan of the MoMA exhibition.¹⁹

By the time he conceived The Family of Man, Steichen had perfected the art of exhibition design as a pictorial narrative that would exploit photography as a vehicle for political communication.²⁰ Also, by the early 1950s, Steichen had moved far beyond the rousing patriotism of his earlier exhibitions and far beyond any celebration of military power (though he still liked to be called ‘Captain’): his message now, in the face of the horrifying nuclear arms race and in the chilled and threatening political climate of the Cold War, was the necessity of global cooperation and peace. Steichen was not alone in making this argument: yet another likely inspiration was a magazine feature that ran in the Ladies Home Journal from March 1948 to March 1949, called People are People the World Over. That series was initiated by photo editor John G. Morris, who was baffled by the destructive power of the bomb and wanted to establish, in place of war, an image of shared values and experiences across the world. Morris and photographer Robert Capa travelled to Iowa, where they photographed a ‘classic Iowa farm family’ eating dinner. For the People are People feature, Morris used the same families from various places around the world, ‘doing the familiar things that all families do – cook and eat and wash and work and play and sleep and so on’.²¹

In order to understand how the hydrogen bomb figures in the conception of The Family of Man, we need to see it in the context of the entire exhibition. The Family of Man has a narrative structure that seems relatively straightforward at first but grows increasingly complicated, doubling back on itself, as the series of images moves to its climax – the hydrogen bomb image. And here I should say that the exhibition and the book follow more or less the same plan, with the significant difference already mentioned, that the image of the bomb is not in the book. I’ll return to that point later, but for now I want to briefly trace the narrative logic of the exhibition, allowing for the fact that the book invites the reader to turn pages in a consecutive order, while the exhibition allows the viewer greater freedom in moving around, looking at one image here, another there. I’ll assume a more or less linear experience, which in the book is made normative by the physical structure of the book, and the latter shall serve as the paradigm for our discussion, with occasional comparisons to the exhibition.

The first part of The Family of Man portrays the life cycle as a universal human experience, regardless of the specific culture or nationality. It’s hard not to observe the thematic groupings, as they move from love to marriage to pregnancy to mothers nursing, mothers and children, children growing up and playing, children in distress, children and fathers. We then are given a sense, beyond the life cycle of the family, of the space of habitation – farms, workplaces, the worker in industrial society, the construction of massive engineering projects. Workers of all kinds are shown, from fishermen hauling nets to workers building rail lines to women washing clothes. Into this flow of life as we knew it before 1945, Steichen introduces the nuclear theme, with images of scientists and architects and engineers. The accompanying captions (which are the same in the exhibition) are significant and are juxtaposed on a single page: ‘Nuclear weapons and atomic electric power are symbolic of the atomic age: On one side, frustration and world destruction: on the other, creativity and a common ground for peace and cooperation. – U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’. Note the balanced phrasing: good or evil? Both seem possible. That quote is paired with one attributed simply to ‘Sioux Indian’: ‘This is the fire that will help the generations to come, if they use it in a sacred manner. But if they do not use it well, the fire will have the power to do them great harm’. Fire also can cause harm or do good. The two quotes are saying the same thing, but making ‘fire’ the equivalent of the ‘hydrogen bomb’ is more than a category mistake. Nevertheless, Steichen is suggesting that nuclear weapons somehow fall into a type of dilemma human beings have dealt with before, so let’s hope …

The exhibition and book continue with photographs celebrating the daily business of life across the wide range of human societies from the developed to the undeveloped world: getting water, baking, eating. Children play ring-around-the-rosy in a gathering of 18 images (the circular layout in the book mimics the museum installation); musicians make music; quilters quilt; we see orchestras, jazz bands, dancers, more dancers, audiences enthralled, nightclubs and dining halls, the pleasures of social life – eating, playing on swings, dancing, racing, swimming, amusement parks. Next is the world of formal education: a tribal circle, a lecture hall, a seminar room, and this leads to a second iteration of the nuclear theme, coupled with ominous undertones of war: on one page is a photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer (the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’) teaching at Princeton, together with a smaller photo of Albert Einstein, whose theoretical formulas provided the logic of nuclear power, also at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein looks deep in meditation, baffled almost, as he stands before a desk piled with dishevelled papers, as if he might be looking for Beethoven’s lost penny. Next to Einstein is an image of the same size, showing us a six-year-old at the blackboard – some future Einstein? – demonstrating basic arithmetic with the poise of a professor. By now, the nuclear music has become an ominous leitmotif in this opera.

Einstein and his avatar are followed by two more images of scientists, now with blackboards filled with equations, plus two images of lab scientists working with glowing materials. The threat of science is fulfilled in the full-page photograph of a bombed German city, Pforzheim, with the ruins of structures in the middle ground, half-standing walls, rubble and in the distance the remains of a church, with the steeple standing but damaged. The damage here was not caused by nuclear weapons, but it was still the product of science and technology at the service of the state. In the foreground is a flight of stone and brick stairs, still intact, leading to the destroyed city below and – the centre of our attention – a young boy is walking jauntily down the stairs, backpack on his back, as if he might be going to school, though there is no conceivable building with a roof in sight. Still, the boy’s presence and the backpack convey a sense of optimism about the future: in the rubble of post-war Germany, new beginnings are being made, a new generation is rising, the photo suggests. Incidentally, the photograph was taken by Otto Hagel, a German refugee whose own future was less certain: after working for Fortune and Life during the 1930s and 1940s, Hagel and his wife, photojournalist Hansel Mieth, were blacklisted following their refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s, where they would have been required to name their associates in the labour movement.

Following the ruins of Pforzheim, The Family of Man recapitulates the earlier life cycle imagery, doubling back on itself, beginning with couples as at the start of the exhibition, but now we see couples who appear uneasily separated, followed by couples who appear closely happy. We see families, street scenes, a wonderful set of street photographs – but where is this recapitulation of daily life going? The answer is eventually found in a full-page photograph of a boy in a cemetery. Images of death and funerals fill the next pages, leading to another full-page cemetery photo. Death is here in The Family of Man, but it is accommodated within a larger conceptual frame: we are yet again brought back to the cycles of life – babies, old and young in one another’s arms, and the caption states the theme here broadly: ‘Flow, flow, flow, the current of life is ever onward […] Kobodaishi’.

Now the exhibit dives into the more affective realm: people alone, suffering their loneliness; others showing compassion, comforting one another. Steichen reminds us next of the Great Depression in a suite of FSA images; then we see images of hunger from around the world. These are the tribulations of life, the exhibition is saying. And how can we cope with all this? The answer Steichen offers is belief in a greater power, a higher wisdom, an answer that seems to be endorsed even by the mythical Einstein (‘To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radian beauty’). Einstein – the theorist of the irrational nuclear age – is here made the servant of a beauty and order and wisdom beyond even his ken. There follow images of worship – churches, synagogues, along with Buddhist worship. Even Anne Frank, that innocent victim of Nazi evil, is brought into service, offering a sentiment that seems contrary to reason even if it is consistent with our wishes: ‘People are really good at heart’, she says to us, accompanied by photographs of teenagers and young women from around the world. And on the next page, amidst images of young men and young women, racing in a hot-rod or playing at the beach, we have the affirmation that underlies the optimism of The Family of Man: ‘You are the young wonder-tree plant, grown out of ruins’, from a Baronga African folk tale. New growth out of ruins: that is what we’d like to believe is always possible, and Steichen is affirming it here.

The Family of Man is taking us on a complicated journey of sentiment, clearly, and things grow even more complicated when the mood is suddenly again changed, this time with a two-page spread featuring a terrible moment in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto: Nazi soldiers are marching a phalanx of captured Jews through the streets – an image used at the Nuremberg trials. The energy of the Jews rushing forward could confuse us, as if they have somewhere to go, apart from death in a concentration camp; the Nazi soldiers stand on either side of the parade, as if they are innocent of the slaughter that lies ahead. The Family of Man now takes a directly political turn: back to children, to a barbed wire Korean prison camp, to images of justice and courts of law, to scenes of public political debate, street demonstrations, facing two images that seem prophetic in their pairing: a skyline of television aerials and below it the photograph of a mass audience at a convention of some sort. The ballot box is next celebrated, and we realize that the sequence is moving from the justice of the Nuremberg trials to the political process more generally in the age of mass media. Yet the ballot-box foundation of the political process – in democratic theory at least – is an important part of this sequence: we turn the page to find three images from France, Japan and Turkey of voters exercising their rights – the locked ballot box.

If Steichen is pointing to the power of democracies to determine their course of action, he then challenges us with the ultimate problem of contemporary civilization: what do we do with the hydrogen bomb? Up to this point we have had premonitions of darkness beyond the natural cycle of life and death; we have seen the destruction of Pforzheim during World War II, we have seen Nazi soldiers rounding up Jews, we have seen barbed wire prison camps and we have glimpsed revolution in the street. The leitmotif of death as well as the ominous music suggesting nuclear weapons have been heard. But the exhibition was working toward a faith in the future that rests with the renewal of energy in the younger generation and a faith in the goodness of human beings and the ballot box. Now Steichen wants to focus our attention on the reality of our contemporary world – the hydrogen bomb, with its promise of total destruction.

And here is where the book version of The Family of Man separates itself from the MoMA exhibition, for what is missing in the book was a crucial dimension of the museum experience, as the press release from MoMA indicates. As the release says, we see

[…] a series of photographs which dramatically raise one of the greatest challenges of our time – the hydrogen bomb and what it means for the future of the family of man. Nine photographs of questioning faces, triptychs of three children, three women and three men are shown with a quotation from Bertrand Russell, ‘[…] The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is quite likely to put an end to the human race […] There will be universal death – sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration’.

At the entrance to the next gallery the visitor sees a photograph of a dead soldier with the words from the 5th-century (B.C.) ‘Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak’. (Sophocles) This gallery is painted black, and the only light comes from a six by eight foot (Eastman) color transparency of the explosion of a hydrogen bomb.²²

The image of the bomb itself – the six by eight back-lit colour photo – was published in the 3 May 1954 edition of Life magazine the year before the exhibition, in an article called ‘New Ivy Pictures Show Fire and Ice’.²³ In the powerful image, mounted in its own wall space, the aftermath of the ten megaton explosion – ten times more powerful than all previous atomic blasts combined – looms as an enormous red cloud, a giant skull-shaped mountain with orange glowing globules, cut across by horizontal bands of reddish clouds against a black sky. (The black sky resulted from the use of filters, which were technically essential, given the blinding flash of the explosion.)²⁴

The placement of the image was equally important: Steichen leads the viewer toward the spectacular cynosure via a wall of photos of individuals, each from a different national and ethnic background, and each seeming to look at something, pondering its significance. A few steps beyond, we realize that they are staring thoughtfully at the hydrogen bomb that faces us as well, darkly framed, glowing in colour. It is a powerful moment, strategically designed for maximum effect in the unreal world of the exhibition, where the viewer has become accustomed to the factitious world of black and white: the shock of a back-lit colour image in an otherwise black-and-white exhibition mimics – however remotely – the shock of the explosion itself.

The skill with which this effect was engineered as part of the viewing experience can only be compared to the ‘Imagineering’ designs of Walt Disney, the greatest inventor of crowd experiences in the world at the time. Though the comparison may seem odd, Disney and Steichen were both consummate artists – not only in terms of their respective forms and materials, but in terms of their understanding of how to move the viewer through a controlled environment. For Disney, the experience of Disneyland began with Main Street, an affirmation of America’s central values; yet at the end of the vista, for the visitor, was the great castle of Fantasyland looming ahead, drawing the crowd to it like a magnet. This was no accident, as Disney revealed when talking about the design of his theme park; such magnets function as nodes, organizing the spatial experience of the park and moving people from one place to another, as you might lure a mouse to a trap with a piece of cheese. (The metaphor Disney used was the hot dog that he himself used to attract his hounds; he called Sleeping Beauty’s Castle – in a term that quickly entered the Disney design idiom and challenges the sturdiest romantic – a ‘weenie’.) Steichen likewise controlled the movement of the viewer, leading his visitor not to the escapist romance of an imagined castle but to the central fact and horror of twentieth-century life – the hydrogen bomb. It seems entirely logical, even if mere coincidence, that these two most successful middlebrow entertainments of the post-war era – the Family of Man and Disneyland – should both open in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, giving powerful form to the opposing impulses to confront the demons of our time and to escape from them into a world of nostalgia and fantasy.²⁵ Both also became part of America’s globally exported culture.

What happened to the hydrogen bomb when The Family of Man left MoMA and underwent its subsequent iterations is itself a part of the history – and the mystery – of this greatest of all photographic shows.²⁶ The travelling exhibition, as we can learn from a photograph of the installation in Paris, featured a black-and-white image of the bomb that appears to be a reversed (left/right) version of the two-page black and white photo published in Life magazine on 12 April 1954; like the original MoMA image, it was strategically positioned, and like the original it too was not the familiar mushroom. It is, however, a different image from the MoMA colour original, and evidently the technical requirements of having a giant back-lit colour image could not be met in a travelling show. In Japan, however, nuclear bombs were excluded altogether from the exhibition, with photographs of Nagasaki by Yamahata included instead. (Such images, showing the horror and devastation of the city, were not part of the original exhibition or book, although Steichen had cropped a Yamahata photo of a Japanese child in Nagasaki holding a rice ball to serve as one of the nine portraits leading up to the climactic Russell quote.) Even these, however, were covered over when the emperor visited the show, in deference, one assumes, to the unceasing illusion, as much as the divinity, that doth hedge a king.

If the argument of the exhibition, so clear in its original form, became muted once it was translated into the many travelling exhibitions, it was even more muffled in book form. In the book – perhaps the most widely printed volume in the history of photography – the hydrogen bomb that was the central fact of the MoMA show, and in a way its raison d’être, has virtually disappeared. The bomb photograph represents death, the possibility of annihilation on an individual and a global level, the threat that hangs over life on earth in the age of nuclear warfare, and for the book Steichen and his editors simply took it off the table. The hydrogen bomb, they seem to have concluded, was simply unthinkable – at least in the form of a vivid photographic image. Only in the special edition of the book published in 1955 with a portfolio of installation photographs by Ezra Stoller, as mentioned earlier, does it make a minor appearance, visible as a photographic footnote in a series of images included as an appendix to the volume. And in that special appendix, it appears not as a primary photograph but as a secondary image, the background in an installation shot taken by Wayne Miller that features a family – Miller’s own wife and children – standing and talking in front of the bomb photo.²⁷ (Miller had worked with Steichen in designing the show from the beginning.) In fact, the three children, who seem to be ages 5 to 12, are focused not on the image we see on the wall behind them but on their mother, who might be ‘explaining’ the bomb, mediating its impact. Oddly, given the importance the photo held in the show, the image in this portfolio of added photographs seems shrunken to near insignificance at the bottom of the page, surrounded by larger installation views – a mere footnote, as the saying goes.

The Family of Man as book makes the same argument as the exhibition, but it is pitched in a different key, so different that the nuclear logic of the conception has been virtually ignored by readers of the book, and the Cold War pastoral of a nuclear arcadia is nearly invisible. Although we have the same anticipation of the missing bomb, the same grid of nine portraits staring at something – as in the exhibition installation – the assumed object of their gaze, instead of an image of the H-bomb, is a black page with white lettering, featuring Bertrand Russell’s stark utterance, quoted earlier as part of MoMA’s press release: ‘ […] the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is quite likely to put an end to the human race […] there will be universal death – sudden only for a fortunate minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration’. The presentation is dramatic, but Russell’s language, understated and with an edge of irony, is not the full colour back-lit image of the hydrogen bomb. In moving from exhibition to book, The Family of Man moved from a rhetoric of shock and confrontation to a rhetoric of philosophical reason, appealing to probabilities, likely outcomes, best authorities. Did Steichen and the editors think through the omission of the hydrogen bomb image? If it was omitted in order to emphasize a more positive message, it was an omission that risked suppressing the logic of Steichen’s original conception.²⁸ The result is that we have in effect two ‘Families of Man’: the shock and awe of the original exhibition and the muted warnings that are implicit in the book version.

Like the original exhibition, the book continues beyond this moment, offering a single line of type on the left: ‘Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak’ (180). With the source identified simply as Sophocles, we might forget that the line is spoken by the chorus in Antigone, upon learning that Euridyce’s son Haemon has been slain. The specificity of guilt that is implied in the original Sophoclean context is, in the extracted text, turned on its head, as if slayer and victim might be interchangeable, as if all guilt is shared.²⁹ Facing the Sophocles quote is the photograph of a dead soldier lying in a foxhole, his rifle standing bayonet first in the ground. We might read this as any soldier in any war, or as the generic Unknown Soldier, the anonymous good soldier who dies pro patria, pro domo. It is a sad image, but it still might evoke conventional heroism and conventional warfare. In a way, it seems irrelevant to the spectacular destructive power of the hydrogen bomb.

Following the hydrogen bomb (or the surrogate contained in the Russell quote), The Family of Man offers us hope – in the form of the many images of couples, for each of which the caption is the same: ‘We two form a multitude’. The words are taken from Ovid – Nos duo turba sumus – and describe Deucalion and Pyrrha after the deluge that destroys the world in the Greek version of Noah and the flood. This is the third iteration of a couples theme in the exhibition, only now much more schematic, the couples looking like multiples, each with the same quote. Moreover, these are not the joyous young procreating couples we have seen earlier: these couples are aged, tired, worn. They have seen everything. Their assumed utterance – ‘We two form a multitude’ – might evoke, especially to viewers in the 1950s, the more familiar sentiments of the widely popular The Grapes of Wrath (1939), where Steinbeck writes, addressing the powerful, that what you have to fear is one person getting together with another person against your authority. This is the ‘anlage’, the embryo, the beginning of shared consciousness, as Steinbeck writes, ‘This is the thing to bomb: this is the beginning – from “I” to “We”.’ (How ironic that Steinbeck should say, this is the thing to bomb.) In The Family of Man, it is the individual (in the nine separate portraits looking at the Russell quote) who confronts the spectre of total destruction implied by Russell’s pronouncement. Following the bomb, Steichen gives us the set of multiple couples. Individuals look at the bomb; couples somehow survive it: the couples pictured on the next pages are the beginning of a collective consciousness.

If the viewer is thinking of Steinbeck here, as is not unlikely, he or she might recall that in Grapes, Steinbeck is writing about a consciousness that grows between one man and another, presumably strangers, squatting beside one another as the women and children listen. In the visual narrative of The Family of Man, we have married couples, representing the ‘nuclear family’ at its core. Yet two men who discover a common interest are different from a married couple, who are already together; and whether the nuclear family – or any collective consciousness – can challenge the potential annihilation of the nuclear age is another question. Moreover, the Ovid quote that is repeated under each married couple photograph confirms the survival of a couple after the deluge, after the disaster. The logic of The Family of Man compels us to realize that such survival after disaster is impossible. In thus undercutting the bleak logic of the exhibition, Steichen is offering hope instead of despair, and that may have been a shrewd judgement, given that he doesn’t want people weeping and gnashing their teeth as they leave the show. Despair is paralyzing, whereas hope might lead to some further action, and the succeeding two-page spread of the United Nations, together with some words from the Charter (‘Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’) may indeed offer us our best hope.

The Family of Man (book and exhibition) ends with a coda of sorts: a multitude of photographs of children, images of innocence, confidence, vulnerability, pathos. The final full-page photograph is by W. Eugene Smith, who was recovering at last from his own traumatic war injuries when he took the photo, and it required several tries before he got it exactly right, in terms of the timing, lighting and posing. We see two children (his own, in fact) walking from the darkness of the forest into the light of a clearing, with the optimistic text, ‘A world to be born under your footsteps […]’ by St.-John Perse. The threat of the hydrogen bomb, we are asked to believe, might be held in abeyance, if we can only cherish the innocence of children. In fact, ‘CHILDHOOD MAGIC’ is the name given to this final grouping in the notes for the travelling exhibition.³⁰ One doesn’t want to be cynical where the future of the world is at stake, but this coda is reminiscent of that moment in Peter Pan when Peter says, ‘Do you believe in faeries? […] If you believe, clap your hands!’ Will the future generation save us? Can we learn to overcome our differences? Can the modern nation state (which doesn’t care how much we love one another) be held in check? These questions still remain to be answered.

If Steichen was inspired by the power of photography that he saw exemplified in the FSA movement, a power to support and inspire social change, then he was doomed to fail. The FSA project was congruent with government power and interest. The Family of Man may have represented the United States as a peace-loving nation, but it was out of alignment with the juggernaut of military production – especially in the face of the development of the bomb by our putative enemy, the Soviet Union. Exported around the world by the US government as a message of peace and a warning against the horrors of nuclear war, The Family of Man was actually working against the policies of the US government, which were to further develop the programme of nuclear weapons – just in case. So we have a perfect illustration of the double bind or paradoxical logic of the Cold War: A= We must stop the madness, or else we’ll destroy ourselves; B= We must keep producing weapons, just in case.

The Family of Man survives today, however, on several levels: it is of course a great work of middlebrow popular art, offering us an astonishingly complete representation of the range of human emotion – from love and joy to shock and horror. On another level, as I have suggested, it can be seen as a Cold War pastoral, an enduring genre that allows us to affirm the value of life at the same time that we must acknowledge the power of death over us. Yet considering the MoMA exhibition against the book version, I would argue that the original exhibition stands as a more complex and powerful work, with its central shocking death’s head Golgotha hydrogen bomb; the book version is a sweeter, less threatening version of that pastoral, tempting us almost to believe in the possibility of global harmony in the family. Barthes and Horkheimer both read it that way, as a temptation to a needed harmony among nations and individuals; but where the former viewed the sentimentality of that appeal with irony and disdain, the latter accepted it with respectful attention and hope. Looking back on it, we can see it finally as a work that sums up the fears and desperate hopes of a cultural moment in a way that is still enduringly affecting.

1 My special thanks to Eric Sandeen not only for his foundational study of The Family of Man, on which I have relied at many points, but for his advice on several specific questions regarding captions; I’m grateful too for his generously sharing of archival materials from the exhibition. Thanks also to Gerd Hurm and Shamoon Zamir for inviting me to participate in this conversation on Steichen and for their valued advice along the way.

Roland Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’, in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 101.

4 Max Horkheimer, ‘Opening of the Photo-Exhibition: The Family of Man – All of Us’, 1958.

5 Erwin Panofsky, in his famous essay on the theme, calls the earlier interpretation of the moralistic meaning of the phrase (a warning against the thoughtless pursuit of riches or pleasure) and the later Poussin version, with a tomb but no death’s head, as initiating an elegiac tradition: ‘I too have lived in Arcadia, and now alas I am dead.’ See Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 295–320. I am reading The Family of Man as a version of the former convention.

6 William L. Laurence, ‘Nagasaki was the climax of the New Mexico test’, Life, 24 September 1945, 30.

11 Charles V. Murphy, ‘Outcasts of Yucca Flat’, Life, 30 March 1953, 24. Murphy writes, ‘The general’s demeanor suggested that he was inclined to rate the A-bomb as something between a heavy hand grenade and an artillery shell’.

13 John O’Brian calls this aspect of the bomb its ‘atomicity’. John O’Brian, ‘The Nuclear Family of Man’, Japan Focus: Asia Pacific Journal, July 2008, http://www.japanfocus.org/- John-O_Brian/2816 (accessed 17 March 2017). Re-published on the History News Network, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/52279.html., 5 (accessed 17 March 2017). See ‘Atomic Explosion stopped at Millionths of a Second’, Life, 9 November 1953, 33.

14 Several images were published in Japanese newspapers in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, before US censorship was imposed, but they seem to have been quickly forgotten.

15 Yosuke Yamahata, ‘Photographing the Bomb – A Memo’ (1952), in Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945, ed. Rupert Jenkins (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1995), 45.

17 ‘All Plans to Evacuate Face Staggering Difficulties’, Life, 12 April 1954, 30.

18 In 1946 U.S. Camera published a book version, U.S. Navy War Photographs, Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, ed. Edward Steichen, text Tom Maloney (New York: Bonanza, 1984).

19 On the design of the exhibition, see Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 44, 133–4.

20 I am speaking of Steichen the individual here, but there are times, when discussing the ‘authorship’ of the exhibition, that ‘Steichen’ can be taken as a shorthand for the team who worked with him as well – Wayne Miller, Paul Rudolph, Carl Sandburg and others.

21 John G. Morris, ‘The Family of Man as American Foreign Policy’, History of Photography 29, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 365. See Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 23.

23 Sandeen writes that Steichen had the colour transparency specially reproduced at the Kodak laboratory in Rochester, NY. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 67.

24 It may be purely coincidental, but the photograph of the dead soldier referred to in the MoMA announcement, which is even more prominently featured in the book version of The Family of Man, was a US Coast Guard image taken during the Battle of Enewetak in February 1944, eight years before the first hydrogen bomb test on the same atoll. It’s unlikely, but possible, that Steichen chose that image because of its geographical provenance.

25 Steichen’s wall of ethnically diverse individuals staring toward the bomb is not unlike the broader diversity that Disney would incorporate into his own signature work of the 1960s – ‘It’s a Small World’.

26 Sandeen notes Wayne Miller’s explanation ‘that a color picture was not practical in a black-and-white volume retailing for one dollar’, observing – and I agree – that it doesn’t quite explain everything. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 74.

27 The image appears in the deluxe edition of Steichen, The Family of Man, which contains ‘A Special Portfolio of Photographs by Ezra Stoller of the Family of Man exhibition on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, New York’ (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 207.

28 The other often-noted deletion was the photograph of a lynching (along with the picture of a mass execution), which was removed from the MoMA exhibition after some weeks on account of its being too powerful, too striking, and causing visitors to pause and gaze, thus interrupting the flow of movement and the flow of the message. See Zamir’s contribution to this volume.

29 The lines remind us of Emerson’s Brahma: ‘If the red slayer think he slays/ Or if the slain think he is slain,/ They know not well the subtle ways/ I keep, and pass, and turn again.’ Horkheimer saw in The Family of Man a reflection of a different aspect of Emerson – his Kantian respect for the individual, together with an affirmation of the pluralism of a diverse American society.

30 Instructions for travelling show, MoMA Archives, scan of typescript. I’m indebted to Eric Sandeen for sharing his copy with me.