2012/12/01 by S. E. James · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements #European history and politics #Photography and Visual Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcs032
openalex publication_date 2012/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In 1955 Edward Steichen's exhibition The Family of Man opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Selected from millions of photographs, under Steichen's strong authorial vision, the images formed a vast illustrated magazine-style montage; an editorialised installation, divided into thirty-eight sections punctuated by religious, literary, or philosophical sayings from around the world.1 A clear symptom of its Cold War age, after meandering through the exhibition space with hundreds of images printed in black and white, visitors were met with a 6 × 8 foot colour reproduction of a mushroom cloud, taken during US H-Bomb testing. An abstract manifestation of the cultural anxiety surrounding the bomb in the 1950s; it was a stark reminder of the ultimate fallout that could result from ideological and cultural differences. Accompanied by a warning from Bertrand Russell that an atomic war would cause ‘universal death’, the bomb's potential destruction was cast in ‘comfortingly’ universalising terms. A large proportion of the images in The Family of Man were selected from the archives of the popular weekly magazine Life, which pioneered populist photojournalism in America from 1936 and reached its greatest circulation in the 1950s. The magazine pictured the world from a glaringly American perspective. Indeed, in the 1940s, Life's owner Henry Luce had used the magazine to celebrate ‘The American Century’, announcing that nation's values as the world's guiding light.2 Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency (USIA), this ‘guiding light’ was shone around the Cold War world as the show went on tour fulfilling President Eisenhower's foreign policy remit to develop new forms of propaganda without ‘the propaganda tone’.3 The sponsors of the show's tour – one of them being Coca-Cola Overseas, the carbonated drink corporation's monthly publication – reinforced its American vision, simultaneously wedding diplomatic and consumerist desires. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that for Allan Sekula Steichen's exhibition represented a profoundly corporate image of the world, as a Cold War utopia.4 Utopia or propaganda, the vision expounded in Steichen's exhibition appeared to be in popular demand on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Seen by over 270,000 people in New York, more than half of the population of Belgrade also visited the exhibition.5The Family of Man's European tour began in West Berlin in September 1955, where it was shown at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Figs 1 and 2), before moving on to the Städtische Lenbach-Galerie in the formerly American occupied Munich. Clearly, the decision to open the exhibition's European tour in Berlin was clearly a highly strategic one. As a city divided by American and Soviet dreams, Berlin straddled East and West. Furthermore, West Germany was America's new, and arguably most strategically important, ally against the Soviet Union.