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Photography after Photography
This chapter is in the book Photography after Photography
3The Family of Manrefurbishing humanism for a postmodern age(2004)By any practical reckoning, the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man organized by the then head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen, should be considered one of the most popular mu-seum blockbusters ever mounted. Between its 1955 opening at MoMA and 1963, when the exhibition was “retired,” it toured thirty-eight countries, within which it made ninety-one stops and was seen by nine million viewers. Ini-tially bankrolled by the Rockefeller family to the tune of $100,000, and with corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola, it then toured the world in four dif-ferent versions under the aegis of the US Information Agency. A paradigm of Cold War “cultural diplomacy,” it graced Guatemala City a bare four months after the US overthrow of the democratically elected Árbenz government, and memorably featured in Moscow in 1959 as part of the American National Exhibition, the site of the “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and Nixon. As for the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, which reproduced almost all the photographs in the original exhibition,1 it has never been out of print. Although the exhibition has been subject to devastating critiques—as pho-tography exhibitions go, it is perhaps the ultimate “bad object” for progres-sives or critical theorists—its phenomenal success requires consideration for several reasons. Among them is the fact that since 1996, the exhibition has been reassembled as a permanent installation at the Château de Clervaux, a renovated castle just outside the city of Luxembourg, and has since become a major tourist attraction.2 But if we are able retrospectively to account for its first success in terms of Cold War liberalism or the needs of American propa-ganda, or its reassuring humanist pieties, what explanatory framework should we look to now, post–Cold War, in the age of global corporate capitalism,
© 2020 Duke University Press, Durham, USA

3The Family of Manrefurbishing humanism for a postmodern age(2004)By any practical reckoning, the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man organized by the then head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen, should be considered one of the most popular mu-seum blockbusters ever mounted. Between its 1955 opening at MoMA and 1963, when the exhibition was “retired,” it toured thirty-eight countries, within which it made ninety-one stops and was seen by nine million viewers. Ini-tially bankrolled by the Rockefeller family to the tune of $100,000, and with corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola, it then toured the world in four dif-ferent versions under the aegis of the US Information Agency. A paradigm of Cold War “cultural diplomacy,” it graced Guatemala City a bare four months after the US overthrow of the democratically elected Árbenz government, and memorably featured in Moscow in 1959 as part of the American National Exhibition, the site of the “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and Nixon. As for the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, which reproduced almost all the photographs in the original exhibition,1 it has never been out of print. Although the exhibition has been subject to devastating critiques—as pho-tography exhibitions go, it is perhaps the ultimate “bad object” for progres-sives or critical theorists—its phenomenal success requires consideration for several reasons. Among them is the fact that since 1996, the exhibition has been reassembled as a permanent installation at the Château de Clervaux, a renovated castle just outside the city of Luxembourg, and has since become a major tourist attraction.2 But if we are able retrospectively to account for its first success in terms of Cold War liberalism or the needs of American propa-ganda, or its reassuring humanist pieties, what explanatory framework should we look to now, post–Cold War, in the age of global corporate capitalism,
© 2020 Duke University Press, Durham, USA

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of illustrations vii
  4. Preface: May the Bridges We Burn Light the Way ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. 1 Inside/Out (1995) 10
  7. 2 Written on the Body (1997) 27
  8. 3 The Family of Man refurbishing humanism for a postmodern age (2004) 43
  9. 4 Torture at Abu Ghraib in and out of the media (2007) 61
  10. 5 Harry Callahan gender, genre, and street photography (2007) 77
  11. 6 Caught Looking Susan Meiselas’s carnival strippers (2008) 94
  12. 7 Framing Landscape Photography (2010) 107
  13. 8 The Ghosts of Documentary (2012) 123
  14. 9 Inventing Vivian Maier categories, careers, and commerce (2013) 141
  15. 10 Robert Mapplethorpe whitewashed and polished (2014) 156
  16. 11 Body Double (2014) 171
  17. 12 The Coming of Age Cindy Sherman, feminism, and art history (2014) 189
  18. Notes 207
  19. Bibliography 237
  20. Index 249
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373629-006

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of illustrations vii
  4. Preface: May the Bridges We Burn Light the Way ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. 1 Inside/Out (1995) 10
  7. 2 Written on the Body (1997) 27
  8. 3 The Family of Man refurbishing humanism for a postmodern age (2004) 43
  9. 4 Torture at Abu Ghraib in and out of the media (2007) 61
  10. 5 Harry Callahan gender, genre, and street photography (2007) 77
  11. 6 Caught Looking Susan Meiselas’s carnival strippers (2008) 94
  12. 7 Framing Landscape Photography (2010) 107
  13. 8 The Ghosts of Documentary (2012) 123
  14. 9 Inventing Vivian Maier categories, careers, and commerce (2013) 141
  15. 10 Robert Mapplethorpe whitewashed and polished (2014) 156
  16. 11 Body Double (2014) 171
  17. 12 The Coming of Age Cindy Sherman, feminism, and art history (2014) 189
  18. Notes 207
  19. Bibliography 237
  20. Index 249
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