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Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man
In 1955, the world was nearly a decade into the Cold War, and growing geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union nearly sparked nuclear annihilation. Public disquiet was felt across the world, and it was precisely at this time that the photographer and curator, Edward Steichen, endeavoured to create one of the most ambitious exhibitions in photographic history.
The show was titled The Family of Man, comprising 503 photographs by 273 artists, from 68 countries; the result of a painstaking fine-tuning of 2 million archival pictures. Ambitious, innovative and forthright in its execution, the exhibition was Edward Steichen’s artistic version of deténte — an easing of tensions amidst global malaise.
At the time, Steichen was Director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography, and he had invited photographers to submit photographs for consideration.
His aim was to capture and celebrate the human experience, a task he believed photography was uniquely suited.
Edward Steichen as posterity recollects him, was perhaps most famous for his fashion photography, changing the way the world viewed the medium. By nature he was a painter, and a look at some of his famous pictorialist works such as Moonlight: The Pond, 1904, shows his painterly gaze intertwined with the mechanics of photography — in short, Pictorialism, of which he was a key member of the movement. The blurring of both mediums — painting and photography — was pictorialism’s motif. Embraced by photographers at the turn of the 20th century, the aim was to widen the gap between amateur snapshot photographers and the work of professionals. Newly available handheld cameras were seen to diminish the integrity of photography as an art form. The pictorialist shunned the readymade, image-soaked, quickened fever of new technology..
‘These photographs are a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world. Photographs made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death.’
— Edward Steichen
Like many critically-acclaimed endeavours, notoriety is rarely free from criticism. In 1957, Roland Barthes criticised the exhibition for its existentialist leanings. Specifically, the show’s depiction of human experiences such as birth, death and work. Barthes also chided the show for its removal of ‘historical specificity’. The images were cast to fit Edward Steichen’s narrative. Barthes felt the context of each individual photograph was ignored.
Like many, Allan Sekula viewed the exhibition as a ‘populist ethnographic archive’, advocating against the show as an ‘act of aesthetic colonialism’. Critics such as Christopher Phillips and John Berger discredited Edward Steichen for the show’s glazing over race and class, and its oppressive view of the public. Many of The Family of Man’s most sympathetic of analysts have argued the show is merely a Life magazine photo essay presented at a larger scale.
A similar blurring of practice can be seen in The Family of Man, albeit a contextual one. Steichen collated many of the images for the show from Life magazine’s archive, with additions from Magnum Photos, Vogue and Ladies Home Journal. Images were mostly contemporary documentary photographs, from East End London streets, to a Coney Island beach in the 50’s, to the rugged tropical terrains of Sumatra, Indonesia.
The photographs in the show were grouped in 37 thematic sections, of which narrated a general story of human life. One room featured a large, backlit colour transparency, with red walls, depicting the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. This was then followed by a photomural illustrating the assembly hall of the United Nations, which was supposed to signify the brighter alternative to nuclear holocaust. The show culminated in a group of images depicting happy children. Famous for its international scope, and new visual experience, the rooms were created with architectural elements in mind: larger images contrasted with smaller ones, often in a linear or geometric way. This range of print sizes offered a new and interesting rhythm for the viewers, and some panels were extended outinto the viewers’ space, tactfully disrupting the relationship one has with art. And indeed in one instance, galvanising one member of the audience into a fieriness with the prints...
Whichever end of the critical or aesthetic scale one sits, The Family of Man has a unique place in the annals of photography, and remains one of the most seen exhibitions in history. Scholars constantly look back on the exhibition and renew their critical interpretations.
Edward Steichen set out to capture the ‘oneness of mankind’ and build a visual manifesto of peace during a time of great turbulence, using some of the most compelling humanist photography of the post-war years. It’s scope: brave, innovative; though controversial in its methods, perhaps. But one way or the other, it was a visual masterpiece of some of the finest photographs on the planet.
Thank you for reading,
Cluster Team & Kieran McMullan.
