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. 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 9 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. 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. 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 2010-2013. 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);<poem>There is dust alive With dreams of the Republic , With dreams of the family of man Flung wide on a shrinking globe; </poem> 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.<ref>