MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

The Family of Man was a photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Department of Photography. As described in the catalogue, the exhibition included photographs representing “the gamut of life from birth with emphasis on daily relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community and to the world we live in – subject matter ranging from babies to philosophers, from the kindergarten to the university, from primitive peoples to the Councils of the United Nations”. The Family of Man was first shown in 1955 from January 24 to May 8 at MoMA, and then toured the world in five different versions for the following seven years. An important part of the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) propaganda programme, the exhibition, which was presented as an expression of humanism, played a significant role in promoting the values of the West as universal in the post-War decades. The version of the exhibition in Moscow (1959) was attended by Steichen himself and later considered by him as “the high spot of the project”. The exhibition was received negatively by photographers, as well as theorists, for its universalism and oversimplification. Philosopher Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957) describes the exhibition as an example of modern myth – in this case that of the ideological representation of “conventional humanism”. According to Barthes: “Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation intrudes some ‘differences’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices’”.