Is there a new kind of “politics” in the air? This report would indicate there is—and there is not.

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On February 22, 1955, six thousand people spent the damp, gray afternoon of Washington’s Birthday looking at a photography exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. It was the most spectacular attendance record in the museum’s twenty-five-year history, marred only by a stubborn lady who was later reported in the papers to have demanded her admission refunded on the grounds that there were no paintings on view—obviously a creature unwilling to make adjustments necessary to the vagaries of modern museology.

All in all, more than a quarter of a million people jammed the museum to see “The Family of Man” exhibition in New York; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where the exhibition was installed during the summer, reported an even larger per capita attendance in that city. There is no reason to believe that the show will draw smaller crowds in Dallas, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Pittsburgh, where it will be seen during the months ahead, for it has already received heavier press coverage than any comparable “artistic” event in our history. Following its American tour, the exhibition will travel abroad under the auspices of the United States Information Agency.

Nor has the fantastic success of this project been limited to the exhibition itself. In book form The Family of Man¹ has been issued in both a paperback, mass-market edition, selling for a dollar, and a more sumptuous, de luxe edition at ten dollars. By July 15, only three weeks after publication, the dollar edition alone was bought by a quarter of a million people, and the book has continued to hold a steady place on the bestseller lists. Last June, columnist Bob Considine had prophesied that “Judging from advance sales The Family of Man will become as much a part of the family library as the Bible.” There was, I think, no irony in this invocation of the Bible as a means of measuring the book’s success; it could not even be regarded as hyperbolic when so many publicists were invoking the Deity himself—as it were, the “original” Creator of this “family.”

The man responsible for “The Family of Man” exhibition is Edward Steichen, Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and himself one of the most accomplished photographers of the century. It was he who conceived the idea, devoting three years to the selection of 503 photographs from a total that exceeded two million. And there is little doubt that Steichen regards it as the climax of his long career, as a kind of monument which embodies his talents and beliefs.

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It is a career which itself forms a historical prologue relevant to the exhibition’s cultural significance. Beginning at the turn of the century as both photographer and painter, Steichen became an associate of the late Alfred Stieglitz in his twin endeavor to promote the new art of photography along with the new painting and sculpture being created in Europe and America. As Stieglitz’s colleague, Steichen frequented the Paris studios of such artists as Rodin, Brancusi, and Matisse, often photographing the masters themselves and bringing back examples of their work for exhibition in Stieglitz’s galleries. Steichen was thus one of the early partisans of modern art in a period which for most of us is history; a period when the greatest plastic art of the century was of practically no concern to the world in which it was created.

During World War I, Steichen was put in command of the U.S. army’s aerial photography. It was one of those unlikely moments in the history of a career when a man’s avant-garde aesthetic inclinations could be fulfilled by a military assignment, for aerial photography was still in an unformed state, requiring an experimental and imaginative intelligence to clarify it. The assignment sharpened Steichen’s photographic interests, and he was soon to abandon painting altogether. In the 1920’s and early 1930’s he worked as a photographer for the Condé Nast organization, his work appearing frequently in Vanity Fair and Vogue, and he was eventually to become involved in fashion photography as well. During both World War II and the war in Korea he was again occupied with military assignments.

In 1947 Steichen became Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art; in many ways it must have seemed as if his career had come full circle from the early days with Stieglitz, for here again his photographic interests were to be carried out in a context which underscored, above all, their artistic meaning.

But the vicissitudes of a half century of photographic culture could not be undone; nor—what Steichen’s work in the Museum might have promised—could a viable synthesis be wrought out of the conflicting artistic, commercial, technical, journalistic, and ideological demands which are now brought to bear on that image-making process which was still an esoteric art in Steichen’s boyhood. His own versatile career is a brief history of the diffusion of photography in our culture; in the process, the art of photography was bound to get away, lost in a jungle of science and journalism.

What is underscored in “The Family of Man” exhibition is the finality with which Steichen has abandoned himself to the journalistic solution of his problematic role in the Museum. This was foreshadowed, of course, in his earlier, wartime exhibitions, “The Road to Victory” and “Power in the Pacific,” but it is most fully articulated in “The Family of Man.” And as so often happens in our culture when art abandons itself to journalism, its mode of articulation has a distinct ideological cast—in this instance, a cast which embodies all that is most facile, abstract, sentimental, and rhetorical in liberal ideology.

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The rhetoric begins verbally straightaway in the giddy prologue which Steichen invited his brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, to write for the exhibition (and the book). A representative paragraph will suffice to render the tone of this prologue:

People! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridgemen, musicians, sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords and the landless, the loved and unloved, the lonely and abandoned, the brutal and the compassionate—one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.

Following a heavy dose of this verbosity, which reads like nothing so much as a schoolboy imitating a young American poet of forty years ago named Carl Sandburg, Steichen himself defines the exhibition as “a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” His method of depicting this “essential oneness” is to place in juxtaposition photographs from all parts of the world, playing up every superficial resemblance in custom, posture, and attitude, until he has whipped up a pictorial rhetoric very like Sandburg’s terrible parody of Whitmanesque sentiment. He thus succeeds in making abstract an art which relies above all on the particular for its integrity.

Yet, much as it might discomfort us to witness this wholesale abandonment of artistic principles, we should be guilty of empty caviling if “The Family of Man” had instead offered us some striking illumination about the world we live in, as journalism is sometimes able to do; if it had really penetrated beneath the surface of our experience. The fact is that it does not; that it cannot. because the assumptions about the world we live in on which it is based have canceled out its capacity for relevance or truth.

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The “scenario” of the book—which is somewhat different from the exhibition—begins with pictures of courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, and proceeds with a more diffuse account of childhood, family life, and the physical labors by which men earn their living. There are interludes devoted to recreation, education, funerals, religious observance, and various manifestations of loneliness and misfortune. It concludes with more photographs of children.

Many of these photographs are very engaging, and a few are beautiful. But does it tell us anything about our lives, about the lives of anyone—anything we don’t already know, that is—to juxtapose Robert Doisneau’s droll pictures of Parisians and a picture by Laurence LeGuay of young “lovers” in New Guinea? On the contrary, it simply begs the question of the universality of experience it is meant to celebrate. If Steichen had been the least bit susceptible to what anthropologists call “cultural shock”—that sudden, brute intuition of the “otherness” of cultures different from our own—he would have had to withdraw the LeGuay picture at once, and thus hold open the possibility that “the essential oneness of mankind” is continuously held at bay by the nagging details of our actual lives.

And what impression, one wonders, are we being asked to make of the fact that two Life photographers have brought off the feat of posing two family groups—Negroes from Bechuanaland and white farmers from America—so that they seem at first glance to have certain resemblances: the generations are gathered together; there are the very young and the very old; in the photograph from Bechuanaland there is an ancient-looking matriarch with wrinkled face and withered breasts, in the American picture there is an old white-haired grandmother of marked character. The question persists: in what sense today are they “as relatives,” as the caption invites us to believe? On nearly every page of the book (just as at every turn in the exhibition), whether with pathos or irony, whether the dramatis personae are young lovers embracing, old women gawking, children playing, adults dancing; whether the photographs are exquisite in their depictions or utterly fallen into cliché—everywhere we are invited to believe in this relatedness.

The vacancy of thought which characterizes this notion of “relatedness” comes into sharper focus when we examine the few scattered photographs of political violence. (Their scarcity seems essential to the ideological assumptions of the book.) The most memorable is a picture of German troops marching Jewish civilians (including children) through the streets of the Warsaw ghetto; taken by an anonymous German photographer against the background of Warsaw in smoke and flames, it was used as an exhibit in the Nuremberg Trial. There is an equally disquieting photograph of two unarmed men hurling pieces of rubble at oncoming tanks in the streets of what looks like Berlin—it may be a picture of the now famous “June Days” in East Berlin but it is not so labeled. And there is a mob scene in Shanghai, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, which infers an intense feeling of political foreboding without actually depicting any violent action.

These few photographs, with one or two others in the collection, are so crushingly contemporary and particular that they remove themselves completely from the facile lessons in “relatedness” which they are intended to demonstrate. And they serve to remind us of how little reality is represented in this visual morality play on the theme of man’s “essential oneness.” They admit for a moment the appalling fact that the most profound link between peoples today is their political link; that if races are “as relatives” in any sense, they are as political relatives. And in the presence of that fact, all pieties about “the universal elements . . . in the everydayness of life” are revealed for what they are: a self-congratulatory means for obscuring the urgency of real problems under a blanket of ideology which takes for granted the essential goodness, innocence, and moral superiority of the international “little man,” “the man in the street,” the abstract, disembodied hero of a world-view which regards itself as superior to mere politics. “The Family of Man” is thus a reassertion in visual terms of all that has been discredited in progressive ideology.

The continuing appeal of this illusionary image of the world, which takes refuge in a supra-political “realism” in order to evade the more vexing ambiguities of reality, was demonstrated to a staggering extent in the press coverage of both the book and the exhibition. Almost without exception, the press took up the matter in the terms Steichen had laid down, as a paradigm of man’s “relatedness” beyond politics. (Only a few art critics raised murmurs about the artistic implications of photography, using it as a stick with which to beat modern painting.) Papers of every political description joined in this applause for an image of the world which relieved them of the necessity to think politically; and in this, “The Family of Man” seems to arrive at its most opportune moment, when the atmosphere of both domestic politics and the “Geneva spirit” conspires to urge wholesale acceptance of rhetorical solutions to critical issues. Augusta Strong, in the Daily Worker, summed it up for everybody when she declared, a little hysterically, “Suddenly you are catapulted into a world completely beyond your worries and concerns of the moment.”

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This applause should not be allowed to obscure the fact that “The Family of Man” leaves the art of photography exactly where it was before, suffering from widespread confusion about its aesthetic status—a confusion which “The Family of Man” itself has now done so much to congeal. And it is this confusion which makes photography peculiarly vulnerable to this sort of ideological infection whenever it is elevated from its common, journalistic tasks. When it is most meaningful—which is to say, when it is most artistic—photography embodies a feeling for experience which is not susceptible to easy programming. Contrary to popular opinion, the vision of photography, which seems so readily representational and “social,” is actually a more personal vision than that of any of the traditional visual arts. Even its polar opposite, contemporary abstract painting, is of aesthetic necessity a more “public” art insofar as it projects a world of forms which symbolize feeling at its most generalized, most universalized levels. (Half of the attacks on abstract painting stem from an inability to apprehend, i.e., to see, this world of forms; the other half may be traced to the fact that the majority of artists in the genre fail to create these forms adequately.) Photography remains contingent on circumstance and personality, and the individual sense of style which the best photographers retrieve from this circumstantiality derives above all from an acute sense of particulars.

The onslaught of mass pictorial journalism has necessarily confined this sense of style to a fugitive status, and in this it resembles the role of art in our culture generally. What is disheartening is to see the agency which claims to preside over the artistic values of photography tumble so easily into the vulgar ideological postures which, with less fanfare and less prestige, if also less taste, thousands of periodicals every day embrace as a matter of course.

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¹ De luxe edition published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster; 226 pp., including 34 pp. of installation photographs of show. Paperback edition published by the Maco Magazine Corp. for the Museum of Modern Art, 192 pp.

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