"The Family of Man" in Retirement
Visiting a landmark photography exhibition in Clervaux, Luxembourg
Edward Steichen’s magnum opus, the photography exhibition The Family of Man, is housed in a castle in Clervaux, Luxembourg. I took a slow train there on a whim one wintry Belgian morning and enjoyed the treat of seeing live prints of pictures that I had become familiar with in book form.
One of the most popular photography exhibitions ever, Steichen’s 1955 show culled from two million submissions a group of 503 shots from 68 countries. He had the explicit goal of easing the tensions of the Cold War – a tall order for a career fashion photographer.
John Berger and Roland Barthes joined a chorus of critics denouncing the show’s simplicity, idealization, and elision of race, class and other specificities of human existence. The Family of Man was even derided as a glorified LIFE magazine pictorial. It’s this last jibe that puts a smile on my face. Imagine a world where sublime images like these were on newsstands and available for a few coins! (This world existed as recently as 1965 but is certainly gone today.) Certainly this show is a drastically optimistic postcard from Humanville. It flatters our yearning for emancipation and also satisfies our hunger for the exotic.
But it would be hard for anyone to say these shots are not executed well, or not technically astounding. If the individuals depicted are flattened, I confess to a certain nostalgia for this flattening. Somewhat like the feeling of flipping through an encyclopedia or a book of national flags, it’s clear that the freakishness and mortality has been removed from these portraits. But the view from 30,000 feet is a good one: pretty good planet down there.
In 1955 the unique crosscurrents of mass media, high art and an utterly turbulent world scene permitted a gesture like The Family of Man. It’s hard to imagine anything similarly ambitious having an impact in the period after the moon landing, or even after JFK’s demise.
For the purposes of this blog, I should talk about The Family of Man’s resting place in a medieval Luxembourg village. The show opened at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Maybe it would have avoided a critical drubbing if it had been displayed unobtrusively at La Guardia or Grand Central. Anyway, the show hits differently now that it’s tucked away in a remote outpost of the Old World. The show harks back to a time when our media enterprises were relentlessly democratizing and making transparent the world and all its human manifestations. The impulse to assemble photos for “world peace” feels very idealized, quaint and privileged (Luxembourg), rather than blunt, edgy, and up-to-the-minute (NYC).
Further Reading: “Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man,” Cluster London.
The Family of Man, Visit Clervaux.