In these pandemic times, I miss being able to go to museums. They are one of my favourite haunts whenever I'm in a new city. Today in an act of longing and with a desire to "revisit", I sifted through photos from some of the ones I had been to and got stuck on these images. These images are from The Family of Man, a photographic exhibition that was curated by Edward Steichen and presented at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1955. 503 images from 68 countries showcasing the universality of human experience.
When I saw it in 2019, it was housed in Luxembourg at the Clervaux Castle, listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World. The exhibition was intense to move through. It felt as if it was curated to overwhelm, or to be taken in very slowly.
Images were of different sizes, stuck in rows on the walls, hung from ceilings, vertically dominating, horizontally engaging, suspended between ceiling and floor.
If one side of the room was done in a way, the other in another. After many images, there would be a couple of lines here and there. And it was clear that the impact would be different for every view and viewer. Even though that is true for any exhibition, it seemed that Steichen had curated it in this manner to highlight the fact that even the same things can ellicit difference.
"If I did not work, these worlds would perish..." Bhagavad Gita
[The images above showed glimpses of people at work, accompanied by a line from the Bhagavad Gita.]
Where do you gaze first? What catches your eye? How do you feel looking at 503 images? Can you really take them all in during just one visit?
"Clasp the hands and know the thoughts of men in other lands..." John Masefield
[The desire for community and seeking similarities were highlighted in the series of images above.]
I couldn't. Some stood out and I looked and felt more around them more than others. The sheer scope of what Steichen had tried doing was beautiful for me: the attempt at trying to capture the similarities in human experiences.
I had visited the Belvedere in Vienna during the same trip and seen a regional depiction of Family of Man by a Viennese artist which had struck me. It had saddened me that the Family of Man exhibition would be perceived by many as reductionist, whereas it felt far from it for me. No human being, theory, or framework can, in one go, accommodate everything under the sun. To say humankind goes through certain events in life does not mean that our individual experience of those events are not unique. To me it seems clear that Steichen put in effort to create a sense of relation, starting from the obvious name of the exhibition to the myriad images he had used from across countries, cultures, time.
The images in this post are fragments of the exhibition. They are of a decent quality but far from great, having been taken by my phone. Still I hope they are able to convey a little of the experience that Steichen tried to create, which is to make us feel related to each other, no matter our differences, to show the threads of experience that bind us across time and space just because we are born into the same family of humans.
I hope this makes you feel like you visited an exhibition or a museum, even if it is in a distant land and time, and instead of your own, through my eyes.
"For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face." - William Blake
[Photographs showcasing compassion and mercy.]
[Photographs showcasing love and togetherness.]
"The wise man looks into space, and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too big; for he knows that there is no limit to dimensions." - Lao-Tze
[These series of images, which had many more than the three I have captured, were around education and learning.]
[These images showed the universality of childhood and birth.]
"Behold this and always love it! It is very sacred, and you must treat it as such..." - Sioux Indian
[These photographs showing the democratic process at work was accompanied by a Sioux Indian quote on loving a sacred thing.]
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