Photography and Citizenship. The Art and Politics of The Family of Man

A decade after the end of World War II, Edward Steichen gathered some 500 photographs from around the world for an exhibition that modeled a cosmopolitan citizenship for a global populace struggling to rebuild a world still in ruins. A renowned photographer himself, Steichen worked as a curator-artist and combined the forms of modernist art and popular address to reimagine the art and role of photography. The Family of Man opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1955 and then toured 48 countries and was seen by almost 10 million people. An original edition of the exhibition is housed today at Clervaux Castle, Luxembourg and has been entered into UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Histories of photography have too often characterized The Family of Man as an exercise in sentimental humanism that was meant to distract from the trauma of war or as part of the US's Cold War cultural propaganda. Photography and Citizenship offers a radically new assessment of both the art and the politics of Steichen's work. Through a sustained close examination of the exhibition, supported by an exceptionally rich selection of images and extensive new archival research, the book proposes that Steichen in fact innovated the forms of exhibition design to fashion structures of thought and feeling that invited audiences to reflect on and experience the demands of transnational civic responsibility in a postwar world.