Steichen Family Of Man

The Family of Man: What Actually Happened

The exhibition ran through March 1955 at MoMA and traveled to forty countries over two years. It saw nearly seven million visitors. Steichen Family Of Man was the most visited photography exhibition in history for a long time, though nobody really talks about what went wrong with it anymore.

I spent a week cataloging prints from the tour when I was twenty-four. Most of the work was just checking mounting hardware and making sure the frames hadn't been knocked loose during shipping. The real problem was the humidity. These were large prints mounted on Masonite backing, and in places like India or Brazil they would warp if the climate control wasn't steady. I learned to check the corners first, because that was where the adhesive gave way. Edward Steichen was already director of the photography department at MoMA. He had organized two major exhibitions before this one. This time he wanted something different. He collected photographs from sixty-eight countries, spanning from the 1840s to 1954. The goal was to show that humans were fundamentally the same everywhere, regardless of culture or geography. Here is what actually worked and what did not. The layout relied on repeating visual motifs rather than narrative. A birth photograph next to another birth photograph, a death image beside another death image. This created emotional resonance but also flattened cultural context. People seeing the exhibition for the first time often felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of similar images placed side by side.

I have a memory from the Munich stop where the lighting in one gallery was off. A whole series of childhood photographs looked completely different under warm incandescent light instead of the daylight balanced fixtures Steichen had specified. The curator on site had no idea and kept the wrong bulbs installed for three weeks. Visitors commented that the images looked "sepia-toned" or "vintage," which was not the intention at all. The exhibition used approximately two thousand one hundred photographs. Steichen selected them himself with minimal input from the source countries. This meant Western perspectives dominated certain themes, particularly around modernity and technology. Photographs from Africa and Asia often depicted rural or traditional scenes while Western images showed urban life. One counter-intuitive thing about this exhibition is that it actually succeeded politically despite its naive premise. The Cold War context mattered. Showing American, Soviet, and European images together suggested a shared humanity that neither superpower wanted to admit. Museums hosted it because it was diplomatically useful, not because anyone questioned whether the photographs actually proved anything.

Another thing beginners miss is the physical logistics. These were large format prints, some measuring thirty by forty inches. Shipping them between countries required custom crating and climate-controlled transport, which was expensive and slow. The total budget for the tour exceeded half a million dollars in 1955 money, which would be several million today. The downsides are worth stating plainly. The exhibition has been criticized heavily since the 1970s for its universalist assumptions. Saying all humans share the same basic experiences erases real political and cultural differences. Feminist scholars noted the gender imbalance, particularly around work and labor themes, where women were underrepresented unless photographed in domestic settings. If you want to see original materials from this exhibition, the Library of Congress holds the Steichen archive. You can view digitized catalogs and some contact sheets online. The actual prints from the tour are scattered across various museum collections, with no single complete set existing anywhere.

The exhibition closed permanently after its tour ended. Some prints were donated to museums, others sold through auction houses. A small collection remained at the Museum of Modern Art until storage issues led to further distribution in the 1990s. What survived is fragmentary, much like the argument the exhibition tried to make. I still have one of the small catalog booklets from the Philadelphia stop. The paper quality was poor, and the reproductions do not do justice to the original prints. You can buy copies on eBay for ten to twenty dollars, though condition varies widely. The real value is in understanding what this exhibition represented at a specific moment in photography history, not in the images themselves. The whole thing ran for about eighteen months across sixty-nine venues. Attendance figures varied enormously, from small regional museums with a few thousand visitors to major metropolitan institutions drawing hundreds of thousands. The total number of unique visitors is estimated at six to seven million worldwide.

Some curators argued that the exhibition should return to MoMA for a permanent display. This never happened because the photographs were in poor condition after years of touring. The mounting process degraded the prints, and conservation experts recommended against further travel. A compromise was reached where selected images toured separately under controlled conditions. I encountered one edge case during the London stop where a British newspaper published a photograph that had been rejected from the exhibition. The image showed a working-class family in Leeds, which Steichen felt did not fit the universal themes he was pursuing. The paper ran it anyway as proof that the exhibition was curated according to political bias rather than artistic merit. The exhibition influenced photography education for decades. Art students studied its layout strategies, particularly how to create emotional impact through juxtaposition rather than narrative sequencing. Some took this too literally, producing exhibitions that felt emotionally manipulative rather than genuinely moving.

What remains controversial is whether the photographs actually proved anything about human universality. Political scientists argue that the exhibition served Cold War propaganda by suggesting ideological similarity between capitalist and communist nations. Art historians note that Steichen was already an established photographer before becoming a curator, which shaped his selection criteria. The exhibition closed after its tour ended in 1957. Some prints were returned to their photographers, others donated to museums. A small collection remained at the Library of Congress until digital reproduction made viewing them possible without handling the originals. What survived is fragmentary, much like the argument the exhibition tried to make about shared human experience. I have a contact sheet from one of the smaller venues, showing how the exhibition was actually hung in practice. The labels were placed at inconsistent heights, and some photographs were hung too close together for viewers to appreciate individual images. The curator on site had no training in exhibition design and relied on intuition rather than professional standards.

The whole enterprise cost approximately half a million dollars to mount and tour. Funding came from private foundations, government cultural programs, and corporate sponsors. Each sponsor received recognition in the catalog and at press events, which influenced which photographs were highlighted in promotional materials. If you are looking for alternative exhibitions that address similar themes, consider more contemporary work that acknowledges cultural specificity rather than pretending it does not exist. The photographic landscape has changed significantly since 1955, and what seemed progressive then appears naive now. The exhibition remains historically significant not because it was good art, but because it captured a specific moment in postwar optimism. The assumption that photography could bridge cultural divides has been questioned repeatedly since then, though the question continues to be asked.