Book dossier

The family of man

by Edward Steichen

"Conceived as an exhibition for MoMA in New York in 1955, with a catalogue published both by Maco Magazine Corporation and Simon and Schuster, The Family of Man has been heavily criticized, usually for its sentimentality and its disingenuous simplicity. Although indeed sentimental, The Family of Man was not as simple as it looked. ... The de-politicization of the photography was in fact a calculated piece of political image-making, stating that American values were the only universal values, and that the world could be one big happy family under the beneficent guidance of Uncle Sam. ... One of the ironic aspects of the project is the way its whole aesthetic derives from those German and Soviet exhibitions and propaganda books of the 1930s. The sententious tone, the grim determinism, the tendentious ideological stance, even the design, place The Family of Man in the propagandist mode of modernism rather than in the utopian wing to which it nominally aspires. Nevertheless, and this is an important point, it contains many fine photographs."--The Photobook : A History Volume II / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004.