The Family of Man Pdf, Epub, Ebook
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THE FAMILY OF MAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Edward Steichen, Carl Sandburg | 192 pages | 02 Jul 2002 | MUSEUM OF MODERN ART | 9780870703416 | English | New York, United States The Family of Man - Steichen Collections CNA In the first two weeks, more than 35, viewers flocked to see it, "smashing all previous attendance records for any photographic exhibition ever held by the museum. The catalogue to the exhibition was equally successful. The catalogue included every image in the exhibition although not in the same sequence or presentation , the prologue by Sandburg, and an introduction by Steichen. Its editor was Jerry Mason, and the pictures' captions were written by Dorothy Norman. Within three weeks of publication, the dollar edition alone had sold , copies, and bookstores throughout New York reported that it was at the top of their best-seller list. By , it had sold over one million copies and had reached ten editions. One columnist believed that "The Family of Man will become as much a part of the family library as the Bible. At the close of the exhibition's American tour, it travelled abroad under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. It travelled to 37 countries 69 exhibition venues , and was equally adored in such diverse cultures as South Africa and Japan, and Russia and Guatemala. The Family of Man was extraordinarily popular wherever it went. An American visitor to Guatemala, for example, described how thousands of Indians came down from the hills, barefooted and on mules, to stand, transfixed, before these photographs. By the end of its world tour in , it was estimated that The Family of Man exhibition had been seen, in person, by nine million people. Steichen was showered with honors. But if Steichen emerged as photography's most persuasive salesman and the public wholeheartedly embraced the exhibition's dramatic gesture of reverence for the oneness of Man throughout the World, the photographic community was less than enthusiastic. The attitude of photographers which emerged from the photographic press was largely noncommittal, often churlish and occasionally outright condemnatory. A few specific comments will provide a flavor of this criticism:. What is worse it is based on ignorance if not a lie. Steichen's choice is the surface of things, reproduced as clearly as possible with a nice moderate respectable gloss. It would be possible to provide scores of quotations along similar lines, and many more dealing with specific attacks on individual images "the picture of the father and boy would be useful for an illustration in Parents Magazine or an ad for baby food" or on other aspects of the exhibition. After a gap of more than thirty years, it might be possible to place the exhibition and its unfortunate reputation into context and perspective. Leaving aside subjective quibbles, such as Sandburg's "verbosity" or the disagreements over the inclusion of specific images, the major issues which have sullied The Family of Man can be discussed under two general topics: 1 photography and 2 ideology:. The photographic issue is quite clear: The Family of Man made no attempt to stress the unique image as the creative result of a special individual. This was not photography as Art but photography as communication, in the service of a theme, which not only took precedence but also totally subjugated the individuality of both image and author. To photographers in the s this was a crushing blow. For decades, photographers had coped with a sense of artistic inferiority. There was precious little, if any, support for personal image-making from grants and fellowships; galleries and museums rarely showed photographs; there were only a handful of academic institutions in the U. The one flowering oasis in this creative desert was the Museum of Modern Art. From Steichen's appointment as Director of Photography in , photographers had a champion, a spiritual leader and, through his exhibitions, a sense that they belonged to a wider community of dedicated artists. Steichen's exhibitions, as already noted, stressed the continuing rich history of the medium, taught young photographers, through the images of master photographers, the principles of creativity with a camera, and selected individuals whose work was displayed with as much care and attention and seriousness as that by any artist in any other medium. The Family of Man shattered that emphasis on the individuality and uniqueness of the photographic image. Now, photographs were merely subservient to the theme, relegated, once again, to the status of journalistic or advertising illustrations. What did it matter if the theme was a moral one? The photographs were not displayed as monuments to the medium but as symbolic pictures, like individual letters in a sentence. It was the totality of the photographs, The Theme, which drew attention, not individual images which only served to reinforce the idea. At that time, , Steichen's volte face in his stand on photographic exhibitions was shocking in its suddenness and startling because, in the absence of any other photographic activity of equal importance, all eyes were on the Museum of Modern Art. This sudden disrespect for photography, as it seemed, especially from such a revered figure as Steichen, was compounded by Rudolph's exhibition design. It is understandable why photographers were disappointed or infuriated. Steichen was not only fraternizing with the enemy the public but was paying his way into its favor with the currency photographs of his friends. No wonder the friends, the photographic community, felt betrayed. Out of these thirteen, seven images explicitly focus on the suffering, the starving, the insane, the sick, and the dying. These images belong to the sensationalist shock-journalism of the human crisis that the illustrated magazines proliferated. A naked baby whose stomach is bloated from malnutrition sits on the floor and eagerly eats rice in an image by American photographer William Vandivert — working for Life magazine. A group of elderly, starving, and desperately, dramatically grimacing women wrapped in rags are observed in close-up in an image by Magnum member, Swiss photographer Werner Bischof — Out of the thirteen images depicting India in The Family of Man , only one was made by an Indian photographer — it is an image attributed to the film director Satyajit Ray — showing seemingly healthy and well-off children. Unlike the majority of images in the exhibition, however, this image is not a documentary reportage, but a film still. The inclusion of an image by a local, non- Western photographer in The Family of Man was a rare exception. Out of individually credited photographers whose work was used in the exhibition, only twelve or 4. Around the time of the world tour of The Family of Man , however, there was at least one organized attempt to bring to light work made by a more inclusive transnational group of photographers. It was the FIAP Biennial — an international exhibition of creative photography of an unprecedented scope at the time. The biennial, established in , was conceived as a world survey of contemporary photographic art, displaying an equal number of works from each participating country. FIAP continues to exist to the present day. Even with the best intentions, the Western photographers at times reproduced the worst cultural stereotypes of the colonial era. Meanwhile, Indian photographers who participated in FIAP aimed at creating a more positive view of their country. For example, in an image by Indian photographer K. The viewpoint is from above, and the frame is filled with an even surface of water. The horizon line or any other signifiers of the location of the scene are not visible. Two male figures occupy the two boats farthest away from the camera. One man has turned his back while the other is seen in profile. Their body language suggests that they may be engaged in a conversation with each other. The title suggests an awareness of the social circumstances they share. Yet the source of their unemployment is not specified — the viewers do not learn if the men have no work because the fishing season is over or has not started, or because of other, unknown reasons. Whether the two figures on their boats are fully employed or not, does not influence the perception of the image. Its main content is the rhythm of geometric shapes and an exploration of the flatness effect of the photographic image. Besides being a depiction of everyday life in a school, Music is a sophisticated study of photographic composition. From an elevated and quite distant viewpoint, the camera is looking down toward a row of ten children wearing white tank-top shirts and shorts. The children are aligned along a circle drawn on the floor. Inside the circle, there are nine empty chairs. Outside the circle, in the upper left corner of the frame, an adult oversees the proceeding of what likely is to be a game of musical chairs, a common gym activity in schools. The source of light is outside the frame, coming from the upper-left corner and positioned extremely low, suggesting either early morning or late evening light. The main visual feature of this image is the elongated shadows cast by the children that stretch diagonally to the lower-right corner. The dark shadows create a strong diagonal that intersects with the narrow white lines on the ground. Although children at play is one of the typical tropes of postwar humanist photography, here the author avoids superficial sentiment by keeping the children, the location, and circumstances of their play anonymous. Vidyavrata turns a potentially humanist subject matter into an exercise in modernist aesthetics. The compositional arrangement of bodies in space, distinct geometrical shapes and lines — not the children who are playing a game — become the main elements of the work.