Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Overseas , December 1958. Cover.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Rethinking Sekula from the Global South: Humanist Revisited

TAMAR GARB

The photographic exhibition The Family of Man—a vast display of enlarged, cropped, cut, and recomposed black-and-white prints—was initiated in New York in 1955 during the height of the and under the cloud of McCarthyism in a still controversial curatorial tour de force by the ’s curator of photography, . Under the aus - pices of the United States Information Agency, the exhibition subsequently went on a world tour of sixty-one countries that lasted until 1962 and stretched from Europe to Latin America, from India and Japan to Africa and the Middle East. 1 Steichen was the exhibition’s initiator, orchestrator, and champion. He stewarded its journey across the world with missionary zeal and entrepreneurial prowess, armed with a vision of a unifying message for all the planet’s people and a belief in the camera’s capacity to provide a testament to a shared humanity that surpassed caste, class, and color. 2 One of the most trenchant and influential critiques of the show was launched in Allan Sekula’s “Traffic in Photographs” (1981), in which he sys - tematically argues not only against the show’s promotion of the bourgeois nuclear family as a transnational and transcultural unit but against the show’s assertion of photography as a transparent, universally accessible language. 3 For Sekula the show amounted to an endorsement of family- based consumerism consistent with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to promote American values, commodities, and culture abroad. Photography and the myth of its transparency, accessibility, and universalism served, Sekula argues, to underwrite an essentially expansionist, patriotic, and patriarchal project. Whether regarded as a neocolonial conspiracy and tool of American propaganda or as a liberal declaration of human rights tantamount to a utopian manifesto, the show remains a contested site of cultural debate, and a new interest and enthusiasm for its curatorial and critical complexity has recently emerged. 4 But so far little has been written about the exhibition

Grey Room 55, Spring 2014, pp. 34–57. © 2014 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 itself, or the powerful critiques it has generated, from the perspective of what is loosely and controversially called the Global South. 5 Nor has much atten - tion been paid to the voices of those who viewed and used the exhibition from the erstwhile peripheries to which it was so extravagantly shipped. 6 I propose that by taking the viewing context of South Africa seriously, we can open up questions about the critical orthodoxies that have until quite recently dominated our discussions of the exhibition and its assigned place in much photographic history and theory. By regarding The Family of Man from a dif - ferent vantage point—both geographically and conceptually—we can expand the discussion of the politics and poetics of . In December 1958, the corporate magazine Coca-Cola Overseas included a section celebrating its sponsorship of The Family of Man in Johannesburg, the commercial center and largest city in the Union of South Africa. 7 While the cover of the issue featured a photograph of an ideal Coke-consuming couple smiling “On the banks of the Tiber in Rome with the Castel Saint’Angelo in the background,” the inside included four well-illustrated pages endorsing the famous traveling exhibition, which had opened in the Government Pavilion of the Rand Spring Show in Johannesburg in late August 1958. 8 As Sekula undoubtedly would have pointed out, the installa - tion shots, with images of queuing crowds and evidence of the sponsor’s well-placed merchandise, construct a universe in which photographs and consumables circulate, like the people they address and interpellate, in carefully plotted patterns and well-ordered lines. A double-page spread at the heart of the magazine makes the conjunction between global trade and obedient forms of spectatorship and consumption eminently clear. Neatly dressed men and smiling women line up in the Exhibition Hall against the backdrop of a standard map of the world, brushing against its southernmost landmasses, as if suspended in the vast dark ocean that surrounds them. The large hemispherical globe installed at the entrance to the exhibition is encircled by a strap of Coke bottles, invoking at once the universalizing message of the exhibition, its international traveling trajectory, and its imbrication in the exchange of goods and commercial circuits that helped to finance its peripatetic life. As a poster at the entrance to the exhibition makes clear, the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Johannesburg bore the costs of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Opposite and right: “‘The Family of Man’ Photographic Exhibition at Johannesburg, Union of South Africa,” in Coca-Cola Overseas , December 1958.

production and transport for the show. Local acknowledgments are made to the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society at whose annual trade fare, the Rand Spring Show, the exhibition was installed, and to a certain Kobus Esterhuysen (of whom we know nothing) “for designing and staging the exhibition.” Among the photographs of the “long queues waiting outside the Family of Man exhibition” and carefully chosen viewers drawn from the Coca-Cola Bottling Company’s Southern African staff is a shot of the refreshment kiosk at the exhibition site, replete with its own iconic and tex - tual invocation of the bourgeois nuclear family (all white, of course), seen as both physically larger than life in an advertising billboard and ideally positioned to consume ever more quantities of Coke, advertised in marketing - speak as “Family Size.” 9 Coke’s co-option of the discourse of the family, central to Steichen’s metaphoric construction of a universal community of interrelated and mutually empathetic global citizens, is a witty marketing strategy that harnesses the sale of a sugary drink to the curator’s utopian project. As Sekula argues, Coke was savvy about using the opportunity of the show to promote its brand, ensure sales, and ally its product to a feel- good fantasy of human well-being in an increasingly globalized market. 10 Nor was the irony of Coke’s visible presence in the South African landscape lost on Sekula. He observes, “In the political landscape of apartheid, char - acterized by a brutal racial hierarchy of caloric intake and forced separation of black families, sugar and familial sentiment were made to comingle in the imagination.” 11 In the context of The Family of Man in Johannesburg, the framing presence of Coca-Cola and the United States Information Agency speaks to the two institutional structures that are among the key targets of Sekula’s powerful critique of the show’s ideological underpinning: corporate capi - tal and U.S. neocolonial ambitions. These are seen to be mutually reinforc - ing. In “The Traffic in Photographs,” Sekula argues that The Family of Man links photography and power in a way that legitimizes the bourgeois, nuclear family as the locus of pleasure and patriarchal authority, privatizes everyday life, and enshrines the depoliticized subjectivity of postwar consumer- driven desire, all of which, for him, serve the interests of American expan - sionist markets and military machinations. As Sekula writes,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 The Family of Man universalizes the bourgeois nuclear family, sug - gesting a globalized, utopian family album, a family romance imposed on every corner of the earth. . . . In the foreign showings of the exhibi - tion, . . . the discourse was explicitly that of American multinational capital and government—the new global management team—cloaked in the familiar and musty garb of patriarchy. 12 But Sekula’s critique of The Family of Man also rests on the formal lan - guages and technological underpinnings of the photographs that Steichen and his team had chosen. The exhibition was arranged into sections that tell a story of romance, procreation, maternal succor, familial unity, labor, and collective endeavor. Drawn primarily from photo agencies like Magnum and Black Star and from the American illustrated press, with a sizable num - ber taken from the files of the magazine Life , the emotive images of diverse people purportedly going about their everyday lives amounted, for the orga - nizers, both to a manifesto of multiplicity (all colors and creeds are shown here) and to a declaration of shared humanity, underpinned by a faith in the accumulated capacity of black-and-white photographs to document and declare both. What Sekula finds inherently suspect is the whole endeavor of docu - mentary photography—particularly as it is harnessed in photojournalism— and the worldview it constructs. Hostile both to photography’s claims to depict a verifiable world in objective and neutral terms as well as its rear - guard action against the widespread undermining of the “artistry” of its individual authors, Sekula sees photography as haunted by what he calls “two chattering ghosts,” that of “bourgeois science,” on the one hand, and that of “bourgeois art,” on the other. 13 Neither specter can account for the cir - culation and consumption of photographs as images and objects in the culture of capitalism. But even more perniciously, for Sekula, both are complicit in the overriding and long-held delusion that photography promulgates a universal language, one that needs no translation or transliteration between the diverse cultures and contexts of the world. Sekula is careful to trace the origins of this belief to photography’s inception, tracking the fantasy that photography constitutes a global mode of communication capable of over - coming barriers of illiteracy and language difference from an 1840s tract to Steichen himself, via the pronouncements of August Sander and others. 14 For Steichen, “photography gave visual communication its most simple, direct, universal language.” 15 In an article published in the literary journal Daedalus in 1960, Steichen passionately defended The Family of Man in just these terms, arguing that it offered audiences throughout the world a visual presentation that they could understand without translation or expla -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 nation. 16 Two years earlier, in an article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History , Steichen had asserted that the success of the exhibition worldwide was “irrefutable proof that photography is a universal language; that it speaks to all people; that people are hungry for that kind of language.” 17 Sekula’s 1981 condemnation of the exhibition builds on earlier writing and brings together some of the central themes of his scholarship. Already in 1975 in the essay “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” he had argued for the opacity of photography as a visual language, asserting that photographic meaning is context determined and textually embedded, with photographic literacy being learned, not intuitive or instinctive. 18 Here, too, he developed his critique of auteurist notions of photographic genius and aesthetic mystification. In another 1975 essay he mounted a sustained cri - tique of what he called Steichen’s “bogus humanism,” conceiving of him as the purveyor of capitalist goods in a trumped-up Cold War utopia operating under the pretense of spreading the good news of universal human equality. 19 In 1978 he further developed his critique of documentary photography as the bearer of truth or as the purveyor of universally given or fixed meanings, questioning its capacity for critical understanding of the world and arguing against aestheticization and the arty aspirations of ambitious photogra - phers. 20 Formalism was, for Sekula, the real enemy, standing for a “unifying semantic regime” that neutralizes and renders equivalent disparate images, suppressing differences of context, circuits of exchange, and the use and mediation of images in the interests of a fetishized object of connoisseur - ship or commerce that is semantically and materially impoverished. 21 For Sekula, at this stage, only antihumanist distance reinforced by textual accompaniment, as exemplified in projects like ’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1975), could build in a crucial, critical self-reflexivity about the medium, thereby rescuing it from the naturalizing entrapment of photographic verisimilitude. Sekula returned to The Family of Man in a 2002 essay, looking at the exhibition in the context of digitization, virtual image banks, and contem - porary discourses on globalization. 22 Because of the development of his own practice and politics during the intervening years, Sekula in his later essay noticed the prevalence of imagery of aquatic immersion in many of the chosen works. Despite the iconic invocation of the sea, the photographs failed, in his terms, to take on the waterways as the psychic and commer - cial conduit of a floating, postwar circulation of displaced peoples, wage laborers, containerized goods, and permanently suspended voyagers. For Sekula, The Family of Man has served, therefore, as a powerful vehi - cle through which to think and rethink the way photographs circulate and the claims that are made for them, not only as purported purveyors of trans -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 parent visual truths but as the screens in which and onto which utopian ideals and fantasies can be detected and projected. Sekula is not alone in this, and The Family of Man has come to serve, in Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s words, as the familiar “bad object” of poststructuralist and postmodern photographic theory. 23 Until recently, the exhibition has been a no-go area, embodying everything heinous about humanist bad faith, patriarchal hege - mony, universalizing mythologies, the suppression of history, and Cold War cultural coercion. The most influential critique in these terms was penned by Roland Barthes in his excoriating review written in 1957 and later pub - lished in Mythologies . For Barthes the French translation of the show’s title into “La grande famille des hommes” was symptomatic of a need to go beyond the biological or zoological similarities between human beings signaled by the English phrase “family of man” in order to moralize and sentimentalize about a shared human community, a myth that was, for him, at the heart of the whole endeavor. According to Barthes, the show obfus - cated the particularities of lived experience under specific historical con - ditions, committing the cardinal sin of suppressing history in order to create a spurious commonality and uniformity under the generalized cate - gories of birth, death, love, labor, and so on. In so doing, it posited an over - riding unity between people, a unity understood under the sign of Universal Man that proclaims the existence of a human essence, traceable ultimately to God, the metaphysical underwriter of the whole humanist agenda. In this way history, specificity, and politics, not to mention difference, are dis - counted while the universal language of photography is thought to declaim the shared experiences of all human beings. This critique is well known by now and has been joined by feminist accounts of the show’s complicity with a patriarchal, heterosexist, “bourgeois family romance” that echoes the family album and endorses a model of the conventional nuclear family as a benevolent and foundational institution. I am thinking here of the work of Marianne Hirsch and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, for example, but Sekula himself exposed the gendering of The Family of Man early on. 24 More recently, concerted attempts have been made to rescue the show from these demeaning assessments. Blake Stimson, for example, revisits late-modernist humanism in the 1950s and assesses The Family of Man as a political space for citizenship before mass consumption became the model for social integration and participation in the 1960s. Stimson sees the exhi - bition as promising a short-lived ideal of global subjectivity, akin to the old dream of enlightenment. 25 As such, the show manifested, for him, the fantasy of a cosmopolitan citizenship (articulated pictorially) that was soon to be threatened and destroyed. John Roberts has also challenged the left’s over - riding condemnation of the exhibition, arguing that neither Sekula nor

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Barthes take account of the political contradictions out of which the exhi - bition was organized. 26 Eric Sandeen reads the show as an anti-McCarthy document “because of its insistence that mankind is one,” and he appeals for its specificity in different contexts. 27 Ariella Azoulay has revisited The Family of Man as a model through which to think of human rights, using it as a resource to reimagine a participatory public sphere in which photog - raphy’s realism is not technologically determined but consensual, based, she argues, on a social contract between viewers and generators of imagery. 28 For Jorge Ribalta, Sekula’s work on sea labor can be likened to that of Steichen, an assessment that amounts to a compliment from Ribalta, even if Sekula would not have welcomed it. 29 What these revisionist accounts entail is a rethinking of documentary photography and the multiple mediations that wrest it away from the modernist and geographically limited narratives that dominate the Paris/ New York axis, on the one hand, reasserting its critical realism, while on the other hand, taking on board its philosophical and historical complexity when examined in different locales. 30 My own work on The Family of Man’s installation in Johannesburg tracks a specific set of responses to the show’s highly orchestrated and controlled agenda. In so doing, I take seriously Sekula’s salutary early comments that photographic meaning is context determined and textually embedded, and I use the opportunity to read his pronouncements about The Family of Man against the grain by subjecting the exhibition to the very scrutiny he had earlier advised. 31 The effects of The Family of Man in its many versions and lives cannot be limited to or conflated with the intentions or avowed ambi - tions of its curator or sponsors . In each of its iterations, the show necessar - ily collided with local communities, histories, and interests and was thus constantly being reinterpreted, despite the overarching control of content and mode of display that was retained by its organizers. The exhibition can be seen as constituting a frontier or space of encounter whose meaning was potentially remade by its viewers and receivers across the globe, who were by no means passive recipients of its stated aims but active agents in the ways they chose to apprehend and make use of it. Much of this history is as yet unexplored, especially in the Global South, which is largely conceived in the literature (where it is acknowledged at all) as a passive recipient of the top-down initiatives of the North rather than a generative producer of new meanings. In Africa, the second of the five versions of the show made for export traveled first to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia and later to Nairobi in Kenya and Cairo in Egypt. No research has been published on its reception in any of these places. The Rhodesian context is interesting because it

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 seems to provide the first African instance when a discourse on race enters into discus - sions of the show’s reception. 32 As Darren Newbury shows, one of the few African voices recorded in response to the exhibition was that of a Nigerian student who saw it in Moscow and lamented the portrayal of Africans as, in his words, largely “sick, raggerty, destitute, and physically maladjusted.” 33 I have not yet come upon such a res ponse in Africa itself, although one might exist. In Salisbury, Rh odesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), the fact that the show was seen by 21,000 visitors, “including members of all races,” is regarded as worthy of mention in the frontispiece to the exhibition booklet, pub - lished locally as a commemorative album. 34 This would become a major focus of attention in Johannesburg a few months later. In South Africa, to which the exhibition traveled immediately after its stint in Rhodesia, it made seven stops, beginning with its opening in Johannesburg in August 1958, but it was heralded with great excitement before that in Drum magazine by a journalist who had seen the show in Salisbury. 35 When it came, the exhibition made a huge splash, not only in the pages of Drum (a monthly publication that provided a key platform for emergent black writers and photographers and a vehicle for addressing the issues and interests of an urban African readership) but across the press and media in general. African Mirror , the weekly newsreel watched by thousands before the main feature at the cinema in a pre-televisual age, covered the exhibi - tion in an upbeat three-minute broadcast in which the photographs were unpacked anecdotally and inserted into a narrative of generalized optimism and belief in scientific progress and youthful potential, against the back - drop of social hardship, the horror of two world wars, atomic destruction, and a celebration of the establishment of the United Nations. In a tri - umphalist account of the show, African Mirror promulgated the message that a better world was on the way, supported by shared labor, religious faith, and a renewed belief in humanity. In this it exceeded even the avowed intentions of the exhibitions’ curator and sponsors. 36 But the generalized sentiments and sententious pieties articulated by African Mirror , in which no reference was made to local political tensions or divisions, characterized only some of the coverage of the exhibition. There were those who regarded it as an edifying and entertaining spectacle without taking it on board as a potentially critical intervention into con - temporary legislation and life. 37 To some extent the setting encouraged this.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Opposite: Rand Daily Mail , 30 August 1958. Right: Rand Daily Mail , 29 August 1958.

Hosted at the annual Rand Spring Show orga - nized by the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society, The Family of Man took its place along - side other exhibitions, as well as cooking and arts and crafts demonstrations, a youth carnival, and fashion parades, as part of the annual trade festival, which was one of the largest in the world at the time. Prominent among these forms of public entertainment was the Ideal Home exhibition, a lifestyle and designer fair aimed at middle-class white consumers and designed, according to advertisements, to “attract the entire family.” 38 News coverage in the mainstream daily press shows happy suburban mothers and fathers with their well-dressed offspring cavorting in front of low-lying suburban homes, rationally and carefully planned. Advertisements routinely featured The Family of Man alongside these other attractions, reg - ularly using photographs from the exhibition, such as Arthur Witmann’s picture of an amused group of white spectators from Missouri, as part of the publicity campaign for the entire event. The Family of Man was situated institutionally in Johannesburg in a wider context of public spectacle and family entertainment, and sections of the press were happy to exploit or even appropriate its mobilization of the concept of the universal family of man as an implicit endorsement of the heterosexual, homogeneous, nuclear family and of traditional social roles and structures. For example, members of the highly conservative lady’s society the Maria van Riebeeck Club, named after the wife of the first Dutch settler to the Cape in the seventeenth century, are shown in the Rand Daily Mail smiling at a specially arranged tour of the exhibition. The paper simul - taneously endorsed the wife of the newly appointed administrator of the Transvaal, himself a staunch Afrikaner nationalist and member of the white political establishment, as “Devoted to her Family.” 39 These protagonists of “separate development,” the National Party’s euphemism for apartheid, are projected as matriarchs and protectors of the faith and volk (the Afrikaans word for nation ), yet coexist on the page with publicity for an exhibition designed to mobilize a metaphorics of the family that surpasses difference. The irony demonstrates the semiotic slippage to which the word family is subject and would seem to support the powerful critique of the exhibition as being complicit or at least compatible with conservative social and polit - ical agendas. But this is not the whole story. Another powerful discourse on the fam - ily and on photography also existed in Johannesburg in the late winter of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 1958, one that spoke to the particular crisis in family life and in human rights that the exhibition, for some, pointed to and exposed. For leading Liberal Party member and Rand Daily Mail columnist Patrick van Rensburg, the exhibition placed in opposition to “Apartheid” what he called “Humanity.” 40 Writing in the same paper that had covered the Maria van Riebeeck Club’s visit to the show only two weeks before, van Rensburg used the title and the rhetoric of its organizers to trigger a discussion on the pervasiveness of racism in South African society. For him the show could not be appre - hended as a generalized meditation on the human spirit or as an embodi - ment of the abstract idealization of family values. Rather, he pointed to the divisions, rifts, and conflicts that are the direct result of political policies and ideologies. These he laid specifically at the door of the National Party and its newly elected Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, arch protagonist of apartheid, who was sworn in the same week the show opened in Milner Park. The exhibition as a collection of photographs was of little interest to van Rensburg. He did not dwell on its contents or scope. Rather it served as a useful counterpoint to the political and moral failures of the ruling party, and he was happy to borrow the rhetorical force of its avowed message to make his polemical argument. The Family of Man could not have opened its doors in Johannesburg dur - ing a more politically charged and fraught period. While some in the city were mourning the death of the previous incumbent, Johannes Strijdom, who had died on August 24, others were balking at the inaugural statements and early promises of the new prime minister, under whom the laws of racial segregation were to become even more stringent while being defended as necessary for the protection and prosperity of all South Africans. As the newspapers reported on September 4, 1958, Verwoerd had made six vows in a publically broadcast speech. Among these was his promise to “continue the policy of separation”: “Separation, whether it be residential, territorial or social, does not envisage oppression. The policy of separate development is designed for happiness, security and stability. Only in this way can the weak be protected from the strong.” 41 Verwoerd’s political opponents, including van Rensburg, were not fooled. Segregation was hardly a benevolent force for the collective good, notwith - standing the rhetorical gloss with which Verwoerd sought to embellish it. And Steichen’s Family of Man was marshaled to the defense of their antiapartheid position. Accompanying van Rensburg’s article was a cartoon by Bob Connolly showing Verwoerd and his colleagues engaged in a giant chess game of social division with “Chinese,” “Indian,” “African,” and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Opposite: Bob Connolly. “Tricky Game” (cartoon), Rand Daily Mail , 15 September 1958. Right: James Ambrose Brown. “We Are One,” Sunday Times , 24 August 1958.

“Coloured” pawns defeated and boxed in below. “Group Areas Chess,” the inscription on the table reads, referencing the notorious Group Areas Act (first version passed in 1950, second version passed in 1957) that segregated living space, allocating most of the country to whites and making it illegal for members of one population group to live with or alongside those of another. The demarcated racial group - ings are seen in the cartoon to be manipulated and mastered by the white contestants in a game in which winners and losers are clearly defined. There is no pretense of a family of man. Van Rensburg built on the rhetoric of the show and its title to make his own argument, beginning his discussion with two quotations. The first is taken from Pulitzer Prize–winning poet ’s prologue to the catalogue of the show: “There is only one man in the world and his name is all men.” Van Rensburg offsets this unifying invocation of a shared global humanity with the words Verwoerd had just delivered in the Union House of Assembly, spelling out apartheid as a policy of absolute separation of peoples according to race, not only in territorial terms but in social, politi - cal, religious, and cultural domains—in “every sphere of life.” Where the exhibition is held to proclaim “the brotherhood of man” (van Rensburg’s words), apartheid “represents race prejudice and intolerance. It also repre - sents [the] fear and hate . . . [that is] the political armory of the National Party.” 42 Going on to describe the racism that underpinned South African society and that was the platform on which the National Party had been elected, van Rensburg used the exhibition as a basis for political resistance. He was not the only one. For van Rensburg, like a sizable number of view - ers, The Family of Man exhibition in Milner Park could not be divorced from the political struggles that surrounded it. Even before the exhibition was officially opened to the public, James Ambrose Brown, columnist for the Johannesburg Sunday Times , pro - claimed (hopelessly, idealistically, he admitted) that “it could change the face of South Africa—if it were seen and felt and understood by the right people,” because “no human being seeing and understanding its message could ever hold race-hate in his heart again.” 43 In a long and ecstatic endorsement of the show’s humanist underpinnings, Brown declared that it projected “one world” for “one people.” “We are One,” the title proclaims. And further on: “NO ONE WHO SEES THIS EXHIBITION CAN ANY LONGER DOUBT IT.” More specifically, he wrote, “I would like it to be seen

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 by our Cabinet and by the Stellenbosch apostles of apartheid . . . but there is little chance of this.” 44 In a detailed evocation of the individual pictures on display, Brown sought to undermine difference, looking for the signs that unite people across cultures and countries, and finding everywhere in the photographs evidence to support his egalitarian and antiracist position. Whether in images of courting couples, pregnancy, motherhood, or the stresses of physical work, for Brown the show asserted that which was being undermined every day around him: that people resemble one another in their shared humanity, irrespective of color or creed. He found evidence of this in both the photographs themselves and in the juxtapositions that the installation set up. “I stood amazed at the likeness between a family group of naked bushmen—from wrinkled granny to newest suckling babe— and an American farming family,” he wrote. “Their eyes, their expressions identical.” 45 Blind to the photographic conventions and protocols of posing that produce the pictorial homologies he witnessed, Brown’s reading of the overall display was as a humanist manifesto, one that had particular reso - nance in the political setting he inhabited. What Brown also points out in his review article—which sits oddly on the page alongside lingerie and automobile advertisements—is that The Family of Man came to South Africa on the condition that it would be open to all: “This show says we are one family . . . . It comes to us on the definite understanding that it will be seen by all racial groups. AND SO IT WILL BE IN JOHANNESBURG .” This amounted to a radical intervention in South Africa, where since 1953 the Separate Amenities Act had segregated all public space (exclud - ing only streets and roads) by law. Brown wrote, “People of all races who see it may laugh together and perhaps weep a little—if not openly, at least in the secret places of their hearts. Weep for the folly which separates us man and race.” 46 A similar point was made by Lewis Nkosi for the Golden City Post , whose readership was predominantly Indian and black: “South Africa has problems which are real enough,” he wrote, “but people who see this show will take heart in the realization that human beings, whatever skin-colour, religion or creed, can laugh together, cry together, and hope together.” 47 Although textual evidence indicates that audiences in Milner Park were integrated, witnesses cannot recall whether they saw the show in mixed or segregated groups. 48 But when Lewis Nkosi reported on the show which, in his words, opened “yesterday,” he wrote as if he had been at the opening, not relegated to a special viewing slot or separate event. 49 And one photo - graph of the crowds outside the exhibition speaks to an integrated audience, even if only two potential black viewers are identifiable in the image, one nattily dressed in his suit, the other casually sporting a shoulder bag and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 cloth cap. The fact that the exhibition’s accessibility to all was a condition of its appearance in South Africa was important, allowing commentators to invoke a shared community of viewers, united by collective feeling and faith. They saw the exhibition as facilitating a form of sociability that stood for a larger model of community that could only be dreamed of but that was mirrored by the array of peoples and performances encapsulated in the pho - tographs themselves. The desegregated community of affect that Brown and Nkosi invoke therefore points to a radical space of reception, very unusual in Johannesburg at the time. The exhibition was also embraced and endorsed by the editors and writ - ers of Drum magazine, which supported the work of many black writers and photographers in the period. The Family of Man’s inclusiveness was not lost on the editors. “It is Open to Everyone,” reads the caption of a special inset in the September 1958 Drum review of The Family of Man. 50 Framed sepa - rately on the page, the physical placement of the announcement stresses how important this was. “The Family of Man exhibition is open to everyone. There is no colour bar,” repeats the notice, finishing off with an assurance to prospective viewers that they should “Try to get there—it will be worth any effort you have to make,” a tacit acknowledgment that negotiating the city was not easy for black people hampered by influx restrictions, pass laws, curfews, and a sense that the city was not theirs to inhabit freely. 51 The fact that Drum does not mention separate viewing times for audiences of color reinforces the idea that audiences were in fact mixed. 52 In the segre - gated circuits of Johannesburg, for black people to be included in the polis in this way was not nothing. The Family of Man’s insistence on universal access was not its only important aspect. Crucially, its message seemed urgent and necessary to Drum ’s editors, who announced it with the cele - bratory caption, “The World’s best photographic show is coming to us. It is called ‘The Family of Man,’ Maybe to encourage us to be one!” 53 For Drum , the show stood for a humanism that was, in its words, “the message of every true religion, of every thinker and philosopher and poet since time began.” 54 The discrepancy between the show’s utopian dream and the failures of ordi - nary life were poignantly present, and the show served, it alleged, as a plea for a “common humanity” structured around the rituals and simple roles of daily life. But the editors of Drum , under the leadership of Tom Hopkinson, erstwhile editor of the British Picture Post , did not use the exhibition as an opportunity explicitly to draw attention to the inequities of life in South Africa other than to announce emphatically that the show was open to all. This may be because Drum by the late 1950s already had a sustained track record in publishing extended photo-essays and long articles that focused on the lived experience of urban South Africans, and since the early 1950s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Top: “Zeerust: The Women’s Battle,” Drum , May 1958. © Bailey’s African History Archive. Bottom: “S.A. Picture in Famous Exhibition,” Johannesburg Star , 13 August 1958. Opposite: “The Family of Man,” Drum , September 1958. © Bailey’s African History Archive.

had been a fearless advocate of the interests of black people, including features on the condi - tions of farmworkers, on jails, on mixed mar - riages and racial classification, on protests against the pass laws, as well as on popular culture and local stories. 55 The universalizing message of the show might, in this context, have been more important than its inadequate representation of contemporary Africa and African life, which Drum itself had been com - mitted to covering for some time. Designed in the mold of Life and Picture Post , the magazine had rejected the erstwhile image of the rural African or “native” beloved of the pictorial - ists and ethnographic photographers and embodied in The Family of Man by the two photographs of the only South African photographer chosen, Constance Stuart. 56 Instead Drum had become the vehicle for an image of a metropolitan, African modernity as understood and conceived by a new generation of both black and white photographers and promoted by its successive white editors. 57 Drum ’s coverage of The Family of Man fore - grounds works depicting black experience, largely modern, in pictures by George Silk, Henri Cartier- Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Roy DeCarava (the only black photographer included in the exhibition). The captions included in Drum were as universal - izing as they could be. Even the reproduction of Nat Farbman’s hunting scene from Bechuanaland (now Botswana), captioned as The Hunters— the only overtly nonurban subject in Drum ’s coverage of the show and the kind of image Drum rarely reproduced at this time— highlights the similarities among people despite superficial differences. “All men must eat,” the label reads, “though they seek their food in many different ways.” The picture is placed on the page alongside DeCarava’s close-up portrayal of a couple embracing, accompanied by the assertion, “This picture was taken . . . in the United States, but it might just as well be anywhere else on earth.” 58 Human intimacy and appetite, the captions and photographs declare, are the same wherever and whoever you are. The universalizing rhetoric of Drum ’s coverage and its belief in pho -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 tographs as carriers of universal messages is also echoed in Nkosi’s sustained review in the Golden City Post , the only piece of criticism of the show signed by a black South African writer that I know of .59 For Nkosi the show revealed the power and dynamism of photography as a language capable of asserting the profoundest truths about “Man’s essential unity despite his seeming variousness.” But, for Nkosi, this unity could not be divorced from the spe - cific circumstances in which it was being viewed. He asserted that the pic - tures affirmed what he described as “the oneness,” not just of all people but of “a Luthuli and a Du Plessis,” two names that would have conjured up the opposite extremes of South Africa’s racialized society, the African and the Afrikaner, the black and the white. For Nkosi the show represented the “documented truth about human relationships” in a “supreme lesson large- heartedly taught,” tantamount, in effect, to a statement of faith in humanity. As such, he concluded, it recalled William Faulkner’s famous refusal “to accept the end of Man.” By invoking Faulkner’s acceptance speech after win - ning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, Nkosi was aligning himself with the reparative rhetoric of a literary giant and per forming the kind of creative identification with a white American Southerner of which the Martinican philosopher/poet Édouard Glissant would surely have been proud. 60 That Nkosi’s celebratory and overblown language echoes the much ridiculed and maligned rhetoric that Barthes, Sekula, and others have con - demned is incontestable. Like Steichen and Sandburg themselves, Nkosi saw in the assemblage of images on display a utopian vision of a world that could demonstrate difference while honoring and respecting it. He was not embarrassed to affirm their appeal to the emotions or to describe their thematization of the cycles of life, the modalities of work, and the dramatic interplay of pictures that portray human suffering and heroism, on the one hand, and trivial pleasures and playfulness, on the other. Nor could he resist seeing these as a blueprint for an egalitarian and empathetic world that could only be dreamed of from where he was standing.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 “The Family of Man,” Drum , September 1958. © Bailey’s African History Archive.

Our post-poststructuralist and posthuman - ist vantage points today make difficult an appreciation of the rhetorical force and visual eloquence that the show embodied for those who in the late 1950s were resisting, whether through words or images, the tide of South Africa’s increasingly draconian race laws. What a survey of The Family of Man’s recep - tion in Johannesburg does is prompt a reexam - ination of the historical and theoretical power of humanist rhetoric and of the representa - tional languages that were seen to underpin it. In this it takes a place among the recent work of a number of critics and scholars. Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and others have engaged in a rethinking of humanism as alter - nately strategic, critical, redemptive, reparative, and so on. 61 Revisiting the moment of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and the context of decolonization as well as Enlightenment theories of race and subjectiv - ity, these later authors have found value—controversially—in reclaiming the “human” and the “human ities” as repositories for an ethics of subjectiv - ity that is inclusive, egalitarian, self-reflexive, and, crucially, not delimited by race. They mark a recent willingness to reexamine the historical recourse to humanism that was for so long a theoretical taboo. 62 For politically engaged, antigovernment South African viewers of The Family of Man, humanism and humanist photography were not the enemy. Instead, they offered a vision of a global community and a vehicle to record its particularities that seemed to speak directly to the needs of the moment. For many viewers, to embrace The Family of Man was to refuse to be cir - cumscribed by the labels Native , Bantu , Boy , or worse still, Kaffir , a term of abuse by which black people’s identities were routinely fixed and filtered. To embrace inclusion in a putative human family was to refuse to continue to be consigned to the bestial, the savage, the primitive or to a lowly status on the evolutionary ladder. In fact, inclusion was a matter of survival. No wonder that its language informs the rhetoric of decolonization and African liberation, notwithstanding the understanding of psychic splitting and sub - ject formation in a world overdetermined by race. As the photographer David Goldblatt writes, “I cannot recall anyone questioning the philosophical basis and values of the Family of Man. It propagated what all of ‘us’ wanted, recognition of the commonality of humankind, rather than racial superiority.” 63 He stresses the wider context of image circulation against which the exhibition can be placed.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Photographs from the death camps, the Nuremberg trials, nuclear bombs, what was beginning to come out of Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, the Congo, the end of Empire. These things were still very raw. If Higher Criticism had begun in religion, criticism of the [Family of Man] had not, as far as I know, really begun and would have been highly unpopular. “Eat bread and salt and speak the Truth” seemed both possible and admirable [then]. 64 Here Goldblatt is quoting a Russian proverb that was included in Steichen’s catalogue and encapsulates the realist underpinnings of the doc - umentary project of which it was a part. As such its realist rhetoric was both recognizable and relevant in the South African context. By the time The Family of Man opened, social documentary photography in South Africa was already an established project among politicized cultural workers. In the decades after the exhibition, socially and politically engaged photogra - phy would serve as a powerful adjunct to the antiapartheid movement and produce one of the most important realist projects of the twentieth century. By 1958, left-wing activists like Eli Weinberg and Leon Levson had been using photography to document social issues for over a decade, David Goldblatt had already started photographing daily life under apartheid, and the young black photographers of Drum , such as Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani, and Alf Khumalo, were beginning to have visibility and clout. 65 Goldblatt, Khumalo, and Magubane have all talked about their response to The Family of Man, stressing its importance and influence, even if, for Khumalo, it was ultimately reassuring because, in his opinion, South African photographers were “shooting better pictures than those.” 66 For Magubane, it was a real spur, encouraging and inspiring him to continue on the path he had chosen: “I looked, and I said, ‘These are great pictures. If these pho - tographers who took these pictures can do this, why shouldn’t I?’” 67 The Family of Man therefore entered into an already developed documentary culture. Though it served as a spur and a stimulus for many photographers, it did not reveal an aesthetic that was unknown or untried. And although it exposed local audiences to a wealth of new photographic material gathered under one roof and rubric, the fact that its languages and technologies were recognizable and its message directly relevant meant that its impact was huge. Among the young Drum photographers who likely saw the show, although he left no record to prove this, was Ernest Cole, whose monumental pictorial chronicle of life under apartheid, House of Bondage , was published during his time in exile in New York after he fled South Africa in 1966. In some ways the antithesis of The Family of Man, House of Bondage gives a rigorous pho - tographic account of the minutiae of daily experience under the violence and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 brutality of apartheid. Rigorously bound to one place, and ruthless in its depiction of the effects of legislation on lived experience, nothing about Cole’s exhaustive study is redemptive, relieving, or romantic. He shows us the signs that demarcate social space, overcrowded classrooms, under- resourced hospitals, impoverished living conditions, and modest means alongside the resourcefulness and creativity of people harassed at every turn. This is no utopian dream but a visual record of a living nightmare of daily life under apartheid. As such, it represents a departure from the photographic humanism of Drum and inaugurates the decades of underground “struggle” photography that would become a crucial component of the antiapartheid movement. Small wonder that it, deservedly, earned Sekula’s praise. At the end of “The Body and the Archive”—Sekula’s account of the camera’s com - plicity in the establishment of deterministic social and racial hierarchies and of figural photography’s co-option as a medium for the classification and con - struction of corporeal categories—he uses Cole as a salutary caution against adopting “an overly monolithic conception of realism. Not all realisms nec - essarily play into the hands of the police.” Cole’s realism positively defied them. Sekula understood that history means Cole’s testimony will take “the ambiguous form of visual documents, documents of the ‘microphysics’ of barbarism” and that our problem as artists and intellectuals is to prevent “the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official texts.” 68 Sekula allowed Cole’s documentary realism to speak to the situation it described, and he recognized its revolutionary rigor and relevance. While The Family of Man set out to do something different, involving a compendium of images harnessed to its curator’s agenda, in the context of South Africa that agenda may have signified in other ways, providing a space for a beleaguered community of dissidents to recognize itself differently and to dream, if only momentarily, that it could escape the dehumanizing machine that bore down on it. The hope was short-lived, and the dream unrealized. But, if the evi - dence of the writers and photographers who saw The Family of Man is any - thing to go by, it made its mark and perhaps gave courage to a few to become Ernest Coles and to develop the kind of evidentiary poetics that would fur - nish the resistance movement with its own unique and powerful imagery.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Ernest Cole. House of Bondage , 1967. “During group medical examination the nude men are herded through a string of doctors’ offices.” Hasselblad Foundation Collection. © Ernest Cole Family Trust.

Notes Research for this paper was supported by a generous fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation. I gratefully acknowledge their support. Thanks, too, to Marie Muracciole’s invi - tation to participate in the Sekula symposium in Paris, to my fellow panelists for engaging in dialogue, and to Benjamin Young for his editorial help and support throughout the process of adapting this contribution from a talk into a readable essay. I am also grateful to David Goldblatt for generously sharing his memories of The Family of Man with me. Thanks most especially to Allan Sekula for his brilliance and breathtaking prose and to Abigail Solomon- Godeau for first bringing us together.

1. For a thorough discussion of the show’s world tour in relation to Cold War politics, see Eric Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). For his view of the exhibition as an anti-McCarthy document, see Eric Sandeen, “‘The Show You See with Your Heart’: The Family of Man on Tour in the Cold War World,” in The Family of Man, 1955–2001: Humanism and Postmodernism: A Reappraisal of the Photo Exhibition by Edward Steichen , ed. Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004), 101–119. 2. The poet Carl Sandburg endorsed the show’s intentions, describing it as “a camera testament . . . of humanity.” As quoted in “Common Bonds of Man,” Life , 14 February 1955, 132. 3. Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 15–25. 4. See, for example, John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998); Sarah James, Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Back and Schmidt-Linsenhoff, The Family of Man, 1955–2001 ; and Stephanie Schwarz, “Documentary’s Future Past: A Conversation with Jorge Ribalta,” Photoworks 18 (May 2012): 50–57. 5. I see this project as contributing to a broader debate about the theoretical and political perspectives to be gained from inverting the traditional hierarchical relationship that posi - tions the “North” as the origin and font of “civilization” and thought and the “South” as its recipient or belated follower. For a discussion of this perspective in relation to South African photography, see Tamar Garb, Colin Richards, Achille Mbembe, Riason Naidoo, and Sarah Nuttal, “Thinking from the South,” in Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography , ed. Tamar Garb (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl; London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011), 300–307. See also Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012). 6. An exception is Darren Newbury, whose important chapter on humanist photography and Drum magazine includes extensive discussion of The Family of Man. But Newbury restricts his analysis of the reception of the show to Drum alone and does not deal with its wider appeal. See Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009), 154–159. For my earlier, brief account of The Family of Man in Johannesburg, see Tamar Garb, “Figures and Fictions: South African Photography in the Perfect Tense,” in Figures and Fictions , 38–39. 7. The National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 after having campaigned on the basis of Afrikaner nationalism, segregation, and republicanism, advocating a break away from the British Empire. South Africa became a republic in 1961. Between 1948 and 1958, when The Family of Man exhibition took place, laws were decreed which built on earlier

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 segregationist policies implemented during colonial times to legislate extensively the sepa - ration of people according to racially defined groupings. Representative laws include the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), the Group Areas Act (1950, second version 1957), and the Bantu Education Act (1953). For an extensive discussion of Johannesburg as racial - ized metropolis, see Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds., Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, NC: Duke Univeristy Press, 2008). 8. Coca-Cola Overseas 11, no. 6 (December 1958). The description of the cover image appears on the issue’s contents page. 9. Coca-Cola Overseas 11, no. 6 (December 1958): 13. The description of the “long queues” is used as a caption for one of the photographs in the issue. 10. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 21. 11. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 21. 12. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 19. 13. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 15. 14. Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” 17–19. 15. Edward Steichen, “Photography, Witness and Recorder of Humanity,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 41, no. 3 (Spring 1958): 166. 16. Edward Steichen, “On Photography,” Daedalus 89, no. 1 (Winter 1960): 136–137. 17. Steichen, “Photography, Witness and Recorder of Humanity,” 166. 18. “Photographic ‘literacy’ is learned. And yet, in the real world, the image itself appears ‘natural’ . . . if we accept the fundamental premise that information is the outcome of a cul - turally determined relationship, then we can no longer ascribe an intrinsic or universal meaning to the photographic image.” Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” (1975), reprinted in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 86. 19. Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War” (1975), in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 33–51. 20. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)” (1978), in Photography against the Grain , 53. 21. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism,” 59. 22. Allan Sekula, “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs),” October 102 (Fall 2002): 3–34. This essay is reprinted in The Family of Man, 1955–2001 , 141–187. 23. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Family of Man: Refurbishing Humanism for a Postmodern Age,” in The Family of Man, 1955–2001 , 29. 24. See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 41–78; Solomon-Godeau, “The Family of Man”; and Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs.” In addition, scholars have alerted us to the exhibition’s repression of the Holocaust, its mobilization of the family as a talisman respond - ing to deep cultural anxiety in the postwar period, its segregationist underpinnings, its neo - colonial pretensions, and its aesthetic conservatism. See The Family of Man, 1955–2001 . 25. See Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006), 59–104. 26. For Roberts, “The Family of Man may have celebrated the nuclear family and the American Way of Life but this does not mean that these ideologies were coherent or stable.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Roberts, The Art of Interruption , 5. Instead, he reads the affirmative humanism of the show as an attack on American Cold War policy and makes a plea for a dialectical theory of photography that would allow photographs to speak from the past in nonobjectified ways (see 124–126). 27. Eric Sandeen “‘The Show You See with Your Heart’: ‘The Family of Man’ on Tour in the Cold War World,” in Public Photographic Spaces , 475. 28. Ariella Azoulay, “The Family of Man as a Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” keynote address at The Human Snapshot symposium, LUMA Foundation, Arles, France, 2–3 July 2011. 29. See Ribalta, interview, 21. 30. Sarah James’s work on The Family of Man in Berlin is exemplary in this vein. By sit - uating the exhibition’s reception in postfascist Germany and assessing its impact on local curatorial initiatives, especially Karl Pawek’s exhibition What Is Man? (which followed in 1964), James alerts us to aspects of Steichen’s show that are less well rehearsed: its embrace of photographic seriality, its conception as a giant montage, its innovative installation tech - niques with enlargements and a variety of modes of display, and the possibilities the show engendered of imagining a photographic exhibition as an extended photo-essay in which individual authorship is suppressed and an overarching theme or argument is embodied in the juxtaposition and accumulation of images. James, Common Ground , 47–101. 31. See Sekula, “On The Invention of Photographic Meaning.” 32. In the frontispiece to the album specially produced by the Rhodes National Gallery to accompany the exhibition as a “record” of the event, the show’s capacity to do “great things to stimulate Art and for the evolution of Society” is linked to Rhodesia itself as ”an exciting new multi-racial country.” F.McE in The Family of Man Exhibition at the Rhodes National Gallery , bound photographic album, in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Archives, VII.SP-ICE-10-55.7. 33. Newbury, 158. The show traveled to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, Windhoek, Port Elizabeth, and Uitenhage. See “The Family of Man Overseas Showings (Sponsored by the U.S.I.A),” in MoMA Archives, VII.SP-ICE-10-55.1. 34. “The exhibition was seen by a large audience for a small Capitol town with 21,000 visitors including members of all races.” F.McE, The Family of Man Exhibition at the Rhodes National Gallery . 35. See Newbury, 156. Newbury quotes from the May 1958 issue of Drum . 36. African Mirror , no. 1002, 1958, South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Archives. I am grateful to the SABC archives for supplying me with the footage. 37. See, for example, the coverage in the Afrikaans newspaper Die Vaderland . See, espe - cially, “My Kind . . . Luister . . . Só Doen ’n Mens Dit,” 30 August 1958, 12. 38. “It Will Attract the Entire Family,” Rand Daily Mail , 23 August 1958, 5. See also “A Home Planned for Today,” Sunday Express (Home Journal ), 24 August 1958, 10–11. 39. See Rand Daily Mail , 29 August 1958, 13. 40. Patrick van Rensburg, “Healing the Divisions in the Family of Man,” Rand Daily Mail , 15 September 1958, 8. 41. See Rand Daily Mail , 4 September 1958, 1. 42. Van Rensburg, “Healing the Divisions,” 8. 43. James Ambrose Brown, “We Are ONE,” Johannesburg Sunday Times , 24 August 1958, 8. 44. Brown, 8.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 45. Brown, 8. 46. Brown, 8. 47. Lewis Nkosi, “’Family of Man’ Has a Lesson for Us All,” Golden City Post , 31 August 1958, 4. 48. My sources who attended the show are inconclusive on this point. David Goldblatt told me that he assumes audiences would have been mixed because of the U.S. Information Agency’s policy of integration on its premises. David Goldblatt to the author, e-mail, 23 June 2013. Peter Magubane also has difficulty recalling but assumes that audiences would have been segregated. Peter Magubane to the author, e-mail, 3 October 2013. 49. Nkosi, 4. 50. Drum , September 1958, 39. 51. Pass laws aimed at restricting the movement of Africans in designated “white only” areas—predominantly cities—during colonial times. These laws were extended and further enforced under apartheid when all Africans were obliged to carry identity documents stip - ulating whether they had permission to live and work in the city. The introduction of women’s passes in the 1950s met with huge resistance and the resentment against passes led to consistent protest and campaigns of civil disobedience orchestrated by the African National Congress. See “Pass Laws in South Africa,” South African History Online, http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1806-1899/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994. For coverage of women’s resistance to the implementation of pass laws in the 1950s, see “Why Women Don’t Want Passes,” Drum , November 1958, 26–29, with photographs by Peter Magubane. 52. The inset reads, “you can see it there from August 30 to September 6, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.” Drum , September 1958, 39. 53. “The Family of Man,” Drum , September 1958, 35. 54. “The Family of Man,” Drum , September 1958, 35. 55. See Newbury, 113–172, for a discussion of Drum under the editorship of Hopkinson and in particular his experience in photojournalism as editor of the British illustrated mag - azine Picture Post in the 1940s. 56. Constance Stuart was later known as Stuart Larrabee. The exhibition’s inclusion of her images presented the Johannesburg Star newspaper with an opportunity for the patron - izing label: “study of a Native woman preparing herself for some tribal ceremony.” See “S.A. Picture in Famous Exhibition,” Johannesburg Star , 13 August 1958, 9. For a discussion of Stuart Larrabee’s ethnographic work, see Michael Godby, “Native Studies,” in Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life , ed. Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester (New York: International Center of Photography and DelMonico Books, 2013), 46–65. 57. On the changes in the magazine, which included the title change from African Drum to Drum , see Newbury, 81–112. 58. “The Family of Man,” Drum , September 1958, 37. 59. The article in Drum is unsigned. 60. Nkosi, 4. For a brilliant counterintuitive reading of Faulkner, see Édouard Glissant, Faulkner Mississippi (: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 61. See, for example, Achille Mbembe and Deborah Posel, “A Critical Humanism,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7, no. 3 (2005): 283–286; Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004);

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00140 by guest on 01 October 2021 Paul Gilroy, “Fanon and the Value of the Human,” The Johannesburg Salon 4 (2011), at http://www.jwtc.org.za/volume_4/paul_gilroy.htm; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2007). 62. Useful secondary surveys and critiques of this tendency include Babacar Camera, “The Falsity of Hegel’s Theses on Africa,” Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 1 (September 2005): 82–96; Kate Manzo, “Critical Humanism: Postcolonialism and Postmodern Ethics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 22, no. 3 (July–September 1977): 381–408; and Jane Hiddleston, “Aime Cesaire and Postcolonial Humanism,” The Modern Language Review 105, no. 1 (January 2010): 87–102. For a South African perspective on the usefulness of revisiting “humanism” in relation to art practice, see Colin Richards, “The Double Agent: Humanism, History, and Allegory in the Art of Durant Sihlali (1939–2004),” African Arts 39, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 60–69. 63. Goldblatt to author, e-mail, 24 June 2013. 64. Goldblatt to author, e-mail, 24 June 2013. 65. For a representative sample of their work and the overarching project of documenting daily life under apartheid, see Enwezor and Bester, Rise and Fall of Apartheid . 66. See Newbury, 157. For Goldblatt’s view of the show, see “Interview with Tamar Garb,” in Figures and Fictions , 269. 67. For Magubane’s response, see Ken Light, Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 56. David Goldblatt said, “Photographically, it was a very rich experience for me because it showed quite eloquently what could be done with photographs. That it was also propaganda in many ways is another matter. It was a remarkably effective exhibition.” “Interview with Tamar Garb,” 269. 68. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 64.

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