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| The Family of Man | |
|---|---|
| Name | The Family of Man |
| Curator | Edward Steichen |
| Venue | Museum of Modern Art |
| Location | New York City |
| Date | 1955 |
| Type | Photography exhibition |
| Visitors | ~9 million (touring) |
The Family of Man was a landmark international photographic exhibition curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Conceived as a humanist survey of postwar life, it assembled photographs from hundreds of photographers and institutions to portray birth, love, work, and death across cultures. The exhibition toured globally and attracted millions, becoming a focal point for debates about representation, universality, and the role of photography in Cold War cultural diplomacy.
Steichen developed the project while serving as Director of the Department of Photography (MoMA) and after his earlier involvement with the photographic documentary movement and the Pictorialism transition. Influences on the concept included the international reach of Life (magazine), the photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the portraiture of Diane Arbus, and the humanist ethos associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Steichen solicited images from an array of contributors — individual photographers, agencies such as Magnum Photos, institutions including the George Eastman Museum and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and cultural figures like Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda who supported the exhibition’s moral aims. The project intersected with Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives involving entities such as the United States Information Agency and resonated with contemporaneous exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution.
The show opened at Museum of Modern Art on January 24, 1955, comprising more than 500 photographs arranged in sequenced thematic galleries. Steichen’s display techniques included large-scale enlargements, clustered montages, and dramatic lighting similar to practices used by Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams. Contributors ranged from celebrated figures like Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Yousuf Karsh, Helen Levitt, Gordon Parks, Edward Weston, and Brassaï to lesser-known practitioners solicited from archives such as the National Archives and Records Administration and the Imperial War Museums. Thematically organized sections presented images of childbirth, childhood, courtship, labor, ritual, conflict, and mourning, interweaving works by photographers affiliated with Life (magazine), Picture Post, Time (magazine), and Agence France-Presse. A catalog, designed with typographic input from Will Burtin-style modernists, accompanied the exhibition and was widely distributed during the subsequent international tour through venues like the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
At MoMA the exhibition drew packed galleries and enthusiastic press from outlets such as The New York Times, Time (magazine), and The Guardian. Public response was notable: the MoMA showing and ensuing international tour reportedly reached some nine million visitors, prompting coverage by broadcasters including NBC and BBC. Critics and supporters linked the exhibition’s humanist message to broader cultural movements associated with figures like John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and Pablo Picasso, praising its democratic breadth. Institutions such as the International Council of Museums and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization noted its pedagogic potential, and the show influenced curatorial practice at museums including the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art.
Despite popular acclaim, commentators from journals like Partisan Review and newspapers including Le Monde raised objections. Critics accused the exhibition of fostering ahistorical universalism and flattening political difference, with detractors pointing to the omission or sanitization of colonial and class struggle found in the work of photographers associated with Die Arbeiterbewegung histories or the Spanish Civil War reportage of Robert Capa. Leftist critics invoked connections to Cold War cultural strategies employed by United States Information Agency, while conservative commentators objected to certain intimate images, citing moral debates analogous to controversies around publications like Life (magazine) and exhibitions by Mapplethorpe decades later. Scholarly critiques in journals delivered sustained analyses of editorial selection, representation of race and gender, and the hierarchy of contributors from centers like Paris and New York City versus peripheries such as Accra and Havana.
The exhibition shaped postwar visual culture, pedagogy, and curatorial standards. It inspired later thematic and retrospective exhibitions at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photographic anthologies and textbooks referencing the show influenced generations of photographers and historians connected to Magnum Photos, Farm Security Administration photographers, and university programs at Yale University and Columbia University. The catalog’s global circulation extended the reputations of contributors such as W. Eugene Smith, Garry Winogrand, Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, and Sebastião Salgado, while also provoking reevaluations by scholars associated with postcolonial studies and historians of visual culture.
Primary archival materials related to the exhibition reside in collections at the Museum of Modern Art Archives, the George Eastman Museum, and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The original catalog and documentation of installation layouts, correspondence by Steichen, and photographic duplications are held in institutional repositories including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Copies of letters soliciting images are in the papers of participating photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Gordon Parks, and Henri Cartier-Bresson housed at their respective archives. Research materials have subsequently informed scholarship published by university presses at Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press.
Category:Photographic exhibitions Category:Museum of Modern Art exhibitions