The (Great) Family of Man and the consequences of mythmaking
503 photographs were used in the final exhibition of The Family of Man, including Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother. The images of the hydrogen bomb test and aftermath of a lynching were omitted from both the physical exhibition and the printed book thereafter. The exhibit toured the world, reaching 9 million people—the most for any photo exhibit—in 37 countries on six continents. This did not include China, Spain, or Vietnam (MoMa).
Edward Steichen’s Family of Man has lived a double life of sameness and otherness since its first showing in the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The exhibit’s great undertaking in attempting to capture the similarities of cultures worldwide could never have been perfectly comprehensive. However, the deeper meaning and motivation for the exhibit is what has been called into question.
The myth that it posits—the “great” family of man—understood within Roland Barthes’s formulation of myth, intends to show that a collection of snapshots of the human experience mean something more.
Some called this thinking reductionist; others praised its humbling effectiveness. In both cases, Barthes’s thinking rings true: The Family of Man legitimizes the myth of the same name by taking a collection of human images, all with their own meanings, and deriving a second-order connotation from this collective (Barthes). The exhibit, as a sum of its parts, champions the values of similarity and shared human experience. Said Steichen himself, “Photography communicates equally to everybody throughout the world. It is the only universal language we have, the only one requiring no translation” (Steichen).
His confidence in the legitimacy of his mythmaking was called into question, especially by Barthes, but the human tendency to derive higher meaning from simple concepts persisted—and persists to this day.
Barthes acknowledges that the French translation of this exhibit, The Great Family of Man, implies sentimental and moral connections where a lack of “great” would simply suggest zoological similarity. An “alibi to a large part of our humanism,” this notion of shared human experience contributes to the myth of The (Great) Family of Man. Criticizing the medium and presentation, Barthes argues that photography is dangerously reductionist. “…if one removes history from [universal fact], there is nothing more to be said about them… To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing” (Barthes).
Further criticism of Steichen’s high-reaching conclusions from 503 photographs points out that mythmaking is often founded on the negation of nuance. Said Phoebe-Lou Adams in Atlantic Monthly shortly after the exhibit opened, “If Mr. Steichen’s well-intentioned spell doesn’t work, it can only be because he has been so intent on [Mankind’s] physical similarities that… he has utterly forgotten that a family quarrel can be as fierce as any other kind” (Adams). Abetting this are the exhibit’s own conscious choices already listed: omitting two powerful negative images and failing to visit three countries. That these three countries may not have even desired to exhibit The Great Family of Man complicates the validity of such generalizations further.
When seeing The (Great) Family of Man, museum-goers then and readers in the present are wont to “see no evil” if they were to experience the full effect of Steichen’s myth. In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, artist and activist Susan Sontag echoed Barthes’s criticism of the lack of nuance and context so essential to the higher-order connotations of myth: “By purporting to show that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, ‘The Family of Man’ denies the determining weight of history – of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” (Sontag). She acknowledges Steichen’s collection as an expression of humanism, as Barthes does, and does the opposite of mythmaking—she puts the work in critical context. To her, the post-war period in which the exhibit was made fostered a popular culture wanting to assume the best in people, “…to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism” (Sontag).
The generalization characteristic of myth does not only work to nefarious and revisionist effect, however. That much can be seen from Steichen’s faith in the ability of his work to unite humanity in a positive way—suggested in the very name Family of Man. From a special issue of Aperture Magazine on the exhibit, Barbara Morgan asserts that “… Empathy with these hundreds of human beings truly expands our sense of values” (Morgan). Whether this empathy is well-founded and such values deserving to be universalized is up for contention, but the effect of myth is evident nevertheless.
In creating a second-order meaning from a series of independent, meaningful entities, The Family of Man succeeds. The exhibit uses photography to represent this myth visually: that humans are far more alike than different. Though perhaps best understood with historical context and painstaking nuance, assertions of human nature are far more given to the process of mythmaking. Steichen’s exhibit, for all its shortcomings, succeeds in the creation of higher-order meaning, but the rest of society is tasked with determining its validity. Like many myths, The Family of Man is at once reductionist fluff and elegiac truth—at the end of the day, it is simply something for the audience to behold.
Works Cited
- Barthes, Roland. “Mythologies.” Literary Theory, ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2019, pp. 88-89
- “Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955.” MoMa, https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/archives/archives-highlights-06-1955. Accessed 4 March 2019.
- Steichen, Edward. “Photography: Witness and Recorder of History.” Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 41 no. 3, 1958.
- Morgan, Barbara. “The Theme Show: A Contemporary Exhibition Technique” in “The Controversial Family of Man.” Aperture, vol. 3, no. 2, 1955.
- Sontag, Susan. “On Photography.” Penguin, Harmandsworth, 1977.
- Adams, Phoebe-Lou. “Through a Lens Darkly” in “The Controversial Family of Man.” Atlantic Monthly, no. 195, 1955.