Talk by Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History, New York University Abu Dhabi, in the framework of the 70th Anniversary of “The Family of Man” exhibition and the FoMLEG Project.
Edward Steichen saw The Family of Man as the crowning achievement of his long career as photographer and curator. During its seven-year tour of 48 countries between 1955 and 1962, the exhibition was seen by almost ten million people. This remarkable success placed the exhibition not only at the very heart of Cold War cultural politics but also at the center of mid-century debates about modernism and the loss of audience, debates which circled around contested valuations of ‘high,’ ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ categorisations of the arts. For many critics, The Family of Man‘s popularity is a confirmation that it was middlebrow work that drained the radical content from modernist forms in order to appropriate them for a populist address. This paper argues instead that Steichen as curator-artist fashioned a popular modernism that unsettled contemporary thinking about the middlebrow and cut across what Andreas Huyssen has called “the great divide” between modernism and mass culture.
Shamoon Zamir is Professor of Literature and Art history at New York University Abu Dhabi. His previous publications on photography include The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (2014), Helen Levitt: New York (2021) and Yasser Alwan: Egypt Every Day (2022). He co-edited The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in the Global Age (2018) and has recently completed a book on The Family of Man.