Description

How the United States' most successful photography exhibition actually undermined the country's Cold War-era propaganda and isolationist policies

Curated by Edward Steichen, The Family of Man, an exhibition of some 500 photographs from around the world first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, was the most globally successful art event of the cultural Cold War, with an attendance of some 10 million by the tour's end in 1962. Though much has been written about the exhibition, it remains an event that is poorly understood. Photography and Citizenship offers radically new readings of the cultural work accomplished by the exhibition and of Steichen's aesthetic achievement. The Family of Man was not, as has so often been argued, a retreat from politics into the comforts of a universalist humanism. Instead, Steichen tapped into the prevalent discourse of "the human condition" as well as the aspirations for an emergent postwar world order to fashion a pedagogy of liberal democratic and cosmopolitan citizenship.