“Structures of Rhyme, Forms of Participation: The Family of Man as Exhibition” is a chapter by Shamoon Zamir, professor of literature and visual studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, published in The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age (I.B. Tauris, 2018), which he co-edited with Gerd Hurm and Anke Reitz. It offers a close reading of Edward Steichen’s famous 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Beyond the usual reading
The Family of Man gathered 503 photographs from 68 countries, arranged around the human life cycle: birth, childhood, love, work, death. Many accounts describe it as a sentimental celebration of universal humanity – the view famously attacked by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. Others reframe it as a liberal plea for cosmopolitanism. Zamir argues that both readings focus on the theme and miss the form: how the exhibition actually worked for a visitor moving through its rooms.
Rhyme and association
Zamir’s key idea is “rhyme”. Steichen, he shows, built visual echoes between photographs hung in different rooms: gestures, shapes and situations that return later in another context. Like a refrain in a piece of music, these echoes work at the edge of consciousness and stir memory. They made the exhibition a space of participation, where meaning was produced by the visitor’s own associations, as Steichen himself suggested when he contrasted the gallery with the fixed pace of cinema and television.
The lynching photograph
The essay’s strongest example concerns the seventh room. There Steichen placed a photograph of a lynched Black man in the United States in dialogue with a picture of a South African man under apartheid, and below photographs of Jews being rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Zamir shows that this layout challenged the comforting clichés of American exceptionalism. He also traces how the image was later removed from the exhibition, and how Life magazine combined pictures from different rooms in its own spread.
Why it matters
The chapter is essential for anyone interested in Edward Steichen, the history of exhibitions and photographic sequencing. It shows that the meaning of photographs depends on their arrangement, an idea that matters as much for photobooks and online galleries today.
The book
The Family of Man Revisited gathers essays by historians and theorists who look again at Steichen’s exhibition, its world tour during the Cold War, and its permanent installation at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg, where it can still be visited. Zamir’s chapter is one of the closest analyses of the exhibition’s design. It draws on installation photographs and on the changes made to the show over time, some of which, Zamir notes, had not been discussed before.
Reference
Shamoon Zamir, “Structures of Rhyme, Forms of Participation: The Family of Man as Exhibition”, in Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz and Shamoon Zamir (eds), The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age, London: I.B. Tauris, 2018, chapter 9. The chapter is protected by copyright; the book is available from the publisher and in libraries.