The Family of Man

''The Family of Man'' was an ambitious exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Department of Photography. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career." The title was taken from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem.

''The Family of Man'' was exhibited in 1955 from January 24 to May 8 at the New York MoMA, then toured the world for eight years to record-breaking audience numbers. Commenting on its appeal, Steichen said the people "looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other."
The physical collection is archived and displayed at Clervaux Castle in Edward Steichen's home country of Luxembourg, where he was born in 1879 in Bivange. It was first exhibited there in 1994 after restoration of the prints.

In 2003 the ''Family of Man'' photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value.

American tour

* 1955, 24 January – 8 May: Museum of Modern Art
* 1955, 22 June – 4 September: Minneapolis Institute of Art
* 1955, 7 October – 4 December: Dallas Museum of Art
* 1956, 24 January – 4 March: Cleveland Museum of Art
* 1956, 29 April – 20 May: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute
* 1956, 25 May – 15 July: Baltimore Museum of Art
* 1956, 4–25 June: Saint Louis Art Museum
* 1956, July: Corning Museum of Glass
* 1956, 9–30 July: GEH Dryden Gallery
* 1956, 3–30 October: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

World tour

As part of the Museum of Modern Art's International Program, the exhibition ''The Family of Man'' toured the world, making stops in thirty-seven countries on six continents. More than 10 million people viewed the exhibit, which is still in excess of the largest audience for any photographic exhibition since. The photographs in the exhibition focused on the commonalities that bind people and cultures around the world, the exhibition serving as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II.

The recently-formed United States Information Agency was instrumental in touring the photographs throughout the world in five different versions for seven years, under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art International Program. Notably, it was not shown in Franco's Spain, in Vietnam, nor in China.

European Tour 1

Central America, India, Africa, Middle East

European Tour 2

South America, Australia, South-East Asia

Middle East

Soviet Union

Copy 5: Following a bilateral agreement between the USA and USSR, in 1959 the American National Exhibition was to be held in Moscow and the Russians were to have had the use of New York City's Coliseum. This Moscow trade fair at Sokolniki Park was the scene of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and United States Vice President Richard Nixon's 'Kitchen Debate' over the relative merits of communism and capitalism.

''The Family of Man'' was a late inclusion that had not been originally envisaged in MoMA's itinerary. With a grant to the Museum of $15,000 (less than half of what it requested) and funding from the plastics industry for the radical pre-fabricated translucent pavilion design to house it, a fifth copy of the show was salvaged from what was left of the Beirut and Scandinavia showings, augmented with new prints.

In Moscow, in the context of a trade show 'supermarket' meant to demonstrate lavish consumerism, and a multimedia display assembled by Charles Eames, the collection's overtones of peace and human brotherhood symbolized a lifting of the imminent threat of an atomic war for Soviet citizens in the midst of the Cold War. This meaning seemed to be grasped especially by Russian students and intellectuals. Recognising the importance of the Moscow exhibition as "the high spot of the project," Steichen attended its opening and made copious photographs of the event.

Clervaux Castle, Luxembourg

The original prints from Copy 3 exhibited in the permanent collection at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg have been restored twice, once in the 1990s and more comprehensively during a closure of the museum in the years 2010-201
The Family of Man

An innovative exhibit

The physical installation and layout of the Family of Man exhibition were designed to enable the visitor to view it as if it were a photo-essay about human development and cycles of life, that affirmed a common human identity and destiny against the contemporary Cold War threats of nuclear war.

Architect Paul Rudolph designed a series of temporary walls set amongst the existing structural columns, which guided visitors past the images, which he described as "telling a story", encouraging them to pause at those that attracted their attention. His layout and display features were adapted as much as possible to the international venues, which varied considerably from the original space at MoMA.

Open spaces within the layout encouraged viewers' interaction; to choose their own path through the exhibition, and to gather to discuss it. The layout and placement of prints and their variation in size encouraged the bodily participation of the audience, who would have to bend down to examine a small print displayed below eye level and then to step back to view a mural image, and to negotiate both narrow and expansive spaces.

The prints range in size from to and were made, in the case of the contemporary images, by assistant Jack Jackson, from the negative supplied to Steichen by each photographer. Also included were copies of historical images, for example a Mathew Brady civil war documentation, and a Lewis Carroll portrait. Blown-up, often mural scale images, angled, floated or curved, some inset into other floor-to-ceiling prints, even displayed on the ceiling (a canted view of a silhouetted axeman and tree), on posts like finger-boards (in the final room), and the floor (for a Ring o' Roses series), were grouped together according to diverse themes. Repeated prints of Eugene Harris' portrait of a Peruvian flute-player formed a coda, or acted as 'Pied Piper' to the audience, in the opinion of some reviewers, and according to Steichen himself, expressed "a little bit of mischief, but much sweetness—that's the song of life." Lighting intensities varied throughout the series of ten rooms in order to set the mood.

The exhibition opened with an entrance archway papered with a blow-up of a crowd in London by Pat English framing Wyn Bullock's Chinese landscape of sunlight on water into which was inset an image of a truncated nude of a pregnant woman in an evocation of creation myths. Subjects then ranged in sequence from lovers, to childbirth, to household, and careers, then to death and, on a topical and portentous note, the hydrogen bomb (an image from LIFE magazine of the test detonation ''Mike,'' Operation Ivy, Enewetak Atoll, October 31, 1952) which was the only full-colour image; a room-filling backlit Eastman transparency, replaced for the travelling version of the show with a different view of the same explosion in black and white.

Finally, full cycle, visitors returned once more to children in a room in which the last picture was W. Eugene Smith's iconic 1946 ''A Walk to Paradise Garden''. As the centrepiece of the exhibition a hanging sculptural installation of photographs including Vito Fiorenza's Sicilian family group and Carl Mydans' of a Japanese family (both from nations which were recent enemies of the Allies in WW2), another from Bechuanaland by Nat Farbman and a rural family of the United States by Nina Leen, encouraged circulation to view double-sided prints and invited reflection on the universal nature of the family beyond cultural differences.

Photos were chosen according to their capacity to communicate a story, or a feeling, that contributed to the overarching narrative. Each grouping of images builds upon the next, creating an intricate story of human life. The design of the exhibition built on trade displays and Steichen's 1945 ''Power In The Pacific'' exhibition which was designed by George Kidder Smith for MoMA, Steichen's commissioning of Herbert Bayer for the presentation of his curatorship of other exhibitions and his own long history of initiation of innovative exhibits dating back to his association with Gallery 291 early in the century. In 1963 Steichen elaborated on the special opportunities offered by the exhibition format;

In the cinema and television, the image is revealed at a pace set by the director. In the exhibition gallery, the visitor sets his own pace. He can go forward and then retreat or hurry along according to his own impulse and mood as these are stimulated by the exhibition. In the creation of such an exhibition, resources are brought into play that are not available elsewhere. The contrast in scale of images, the shifting of focal points, the intriguing perspective of long- and short- range visibility with the images to come being glimpsed beyond the images at hand —all these permit the spectator an active participation that no other form of visual communication can give.

Texts used in the exhibition and book

The enlarged prints by the multiple photographers were displayed without explanatory captions, and instead were intermingled with quotations by, among others, James Joyce, Thomas Paine, Lillian Smith, and William Shakespeare, chosen by photographer and social activist Dorothy Norman. Carl Sandburg, Steichen's brother-in-law, 1951 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and known for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, inspired the title of the exhibition with a line from his poem ''The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany'' (1944);There is dust alive
With dreams of the Republic,
With dreams of the family of man
Flung wide on a shrinking globe;

It was Sandburg who added an accompanying poetic commentary also displayed as text panels throughout the exhibition and included in the publication, of which the following are samples;

A popular publication

Jerry Mason (1913–1991) contemporaneously edited and published a complementary book of the exhibition through Maco Magazine Corporation, formed for the purpose in 1955 in partnership with Fred Sammis.It was the first time hard-cover and soft-cover editions were published simultaneously. The book, which has never been out of print, was designed by Leo Lionni (May 5, 1910 – October 11, 1999). Many of Lionni’s book covers, like that of ''The Family of Man'', incorporate playful modernist collages of apparently cut or torn coloured paper, which he repeats, for example in his 1962 design for ''The American Character'' and for children’s books, an aesthetic also used in exhibitions from his parallel career as a fine artist. The publication was reproduced in a variety of formats (most popularly a soft-cover volume) in the 1950s, and reprinted in large format for its 40th anniversary, and in its various editions has sold more than four million copies. Most images from the exhibition were reproduced with an introduction by Carl Sandburg, whose prologue reads, in part:

The first cry of a baby in Chicago, or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, "I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the Family. Many the babies and grownup here from photographs made in sixty-eight nations round our planet Earth. You travel and see what the camera saw. The wonder of human mind, heart wit and instinct is here. You might catch yourself saying, 'I'm not a stranger here.'

However, an omission from the book, highly significant and contrary to Steichen's stated pacifist aim, was the image of a hydrogen bomb test explosion; audiences of the time were highly sensitive to the threat of universal nuclear annihilation. In place of the huge colour transparency to which a space was devoted in the MoMA exhibition, and the black-and-white mural print that toured countries other than Japan, only this quotation of Bertrand Russell's anti-nuclear warning, in white type on a black page, appears in the book;

..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 for only a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

Absent also from the book, and removed by week eleven of the initial MoMA exhibition, was the distressing photograph of the aftermath of a lynching, of a dead young African American man, tied to a tree with his bound arms tautly tethered with a rope that stretches out of frame.

For most purchasers, this was their first encounter with a book that gave priority to the photographic image over text.

In 2015, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the inaugural exhibition, MoMA reissued the book as a hardcover edition, with the original jacket design from 1955 (albeit without the signature of designer Leo Lionni) and duotone printing from new copies of all of the photographs.

Photographers

Steichen's stated objective was to draw attention, visually, to the universality of human experience and the role of photography in its documentation. The exhibition brought together 503 photos from 68 countries, the work of 273 photographers (163 of whom were Americans) which, with 70 European photographers, means that the ensemble represents a primarily Western viewpoint. That forty were women photographers can in some part be attributed to Joan Miller's contribution to the selection.

Dorothea Lange assisted her friend Edward Steichen in recruiting photographers using her FSA and ''Life'' connections who in turn promoted the project to their colleagues. In 1953 she circulated a letter; "A Summons to Photographers All Over the World," calling on them to;

show Man to Man across the world. Here we hope to reveal by visual images Man's dreams and aspirations, his strength, his despair under evil. If photography can bring these things to life, this exhibition will be created in a spirit of passionate and devoted faith in Man. Nothing short of that will do.

The letter then listed topics that photographs might cover and these categories are reflected in the show's final arrangement. Lange's work features in the exhibition.

Steichen and his team drew heavily on ''Life'' archives for the photographs used in the final exhibition, seventy-five by Abigail Solomon-Godeau's count, more than 20% of the total (111 out of 503), while some were obtained from other magazines; ''Vogue'' was represented by nine, ''Fortune'' (7), '' Argosy'' (seven, all by Homer Page), ''Ladies Home Journal'' (4); '' Popular Photography'' (3), and others ''Seventeen'', ''Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Time,'' the British '' Picture Post'' and the French ''Du'', by one. From picture agencies American, Soviet, European and international, which also supplied the above magazines, came about 13% of the content, with Magnum represented by 43 of the pictures, Rapho with thirteen, Black Star with ten, Pix with seven, Sovfoto, which had three and Brackman with four, with around half a dozen other agencies represented by one photo.

Steichen travelled internationally to collect images, through 11 European countries including France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. In total, Steichen procured 300 images from European photographers, many from the humanist group, which were first shown in the ''Post-War European Photography'' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Due to the incorporation of this body of work into the 1955 ''The Family of Man'' exhibition, ''Post-War European Photography'' is thought of as a preview to ''The Family of Man''. The international tour of the definitive 1955 exhibition was sponsored by the now defunct United States Information Agency, whose aim was to counter Cold War propaganda by creating a better world image of American policies and values.

Though most photographers were represented by a single picture, some had several included; Robert Doisneau, Homer Page, Helen Levitt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Bill Brandt, Édouard Boubat, Harry Callahan (with two), Nat Farbman (five of Bechuanaland, and more from ''Life''), Robert Frank (four), Bert Hardy and Robert Harrington (three). Steichen himself supplied five photos, while his assistant Wayne Miller had thirteen chosen; by far the greatest number.

The following lists notable participating photographers, excluding those with no professional or exhibiting history (see original 1955 MoMA checklist):

* Ansel Adams (USA)
* Erich Andres (Germany)
* Emmy Andriesse (Netherlands)
* Diane and Allan Arbus (U.S.A., Vogue)
* Eve Arnold (USA)
* Richard Avedon (USA)
* Ruth-Marion Baruch (USA)
* Hugh Bell (U.S.A.)
* Wermund Bendtsen (Denmark)
* Paul Berg (USA)
* Lou Bernstein (USA)
* John Bertolino(Italy/USA)
* Eva Besnyö (Netherlands)
* Werner Bischof (Switzerland)
* Maria Bordy (Russia, UN)
* Édouard Boubat (France)
* Margaret Bourke-White (USA)
* Mathew Brady (USA)
* Bill Brandt (UK)
* Brassai (France)
* Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexico)
* Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico)
* Josef Breitenbach (Brackman Associates) (Germany, USA)
* David Brooks (Canada)
* Reva Brooks (Canada)
* Ernst Brunner (Switzerland)
* Esther Bubley (USA)
* Wynn Bullock (USA)
* Shirley Burden (USA)
* Rudolf Busler (Germany)
* Harry Callahan (USA)
* Cornell Capa (USA)
* Robert Capa
* Robert Carrington
* Lewis Carroll (UK)
* Henri Cartier-Bresson (France)
* Ted Castle (USA)
* Marcos Chamúdez (Chile)
* Ed Clark (USA)
* Hermann Claasen (Germany)
* Jerry Cooke (USA)
* Roy DeCarava (USA)
* Loomis Dean (USA)
* Jack Delano (USA)
* Nick De Morgoli
* J. De Pietro
* Robert Diament (USSR)
* Robert Doisneau (France)
* Nell Dorr (USA)
* Nora Dumas (French)
* David Douglas Duncan (USA)
* Alfred Eisenstaedt (USA)
* Elliott Erwitt (USA)
* J. R. Eyerman (USA)
* Sam Falk (USA)
* Nat Farbman (USA)
* Eleanor Fast
* Louis Faurer (USA)
* Ed Feingersh (USA)
* Andreas Feininger (USA)
* Vito Fiorenza (Italy)
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