Gallery
A chronological reading of the exhibition's pre-history, making, touring, and afterlife — through photographs and installation views currently in this wiki under public-domain or Creative-Commons licences. Every plate of the 503 in the show remains under copyright with the photographers' estates and is not hosted here; the gallery surfaces only what is openly licensed, in the order it was taken.
1859 – 1922 · Pre-history
Photographs from the half-century before The Family of Man that Steichen would gather into the show, alongside his own early Pictorialist and transitional work and the Brâncuși friendship that would later shape his curatorial method.
Antecedents
Alice Liddell as "The Queen of May"
Civil War dead
Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg
Edward Steichen: Pictorialist and transitional years (1900–1922)
Self-portrait, age 22
Rodin — Le Penseur
J. Pierpont Morgan
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Eleanora Duse, actress
The Pond — Moonlight
Road into the Valley — Moonrise
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In Memoriam
Clarence H. White, photographer
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Experiment (autochrome)
Pastoral
On the House-Boat "The Log Cabin"
Milk Bottles on a Fire Escape
Aerial view of ruins of Vaux, France
Montfaucon, Argonne
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Brancusi's studio, Paris
Isadora Duncan in the Parthenon, Athens
Constantin Brâncuși in his Voulangis workshop
1935 – 1944 · The decade of the contributors
FSA and OWI documentary photography — the federal photography programmes that produced the majority of Steichen's American plates. The images below include sourced exhibition plates (plate IDs noted) alongside representative works by the same photographers. All FSA/OWI photographs are public domain (PD-USGov) with no known restrictions on publication.
Dorothea Lange · Farm Security Administration
Migrant Mother (Florence Owens Thompson, Nipomo, California)
Child in Shack Town, California
Children of Mexican cotton laborers, Casa Grande, Arizona
Family walking on highway, Pittsburg County, Oklahoma
Ex-slave with a long memory, Alabama
Migrant children at nursery school, FSA camp, Tulare County
Migrant cotton picker's child, Shafter Camp, California
Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside
Nettie Featherston, wife of a migratory laborer, near Childress, Texas
Ben Shahn · Farm Security Administration
Children of destitute Ozark mountaineer, Arkansas
Barber shop interior, New Orleans
Man sitting on church steps, New Orleans
Fiddlin' Bill Hensley, mountain fiddler, Asheville, North Carolina
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Russell Lee · Farm Security Administration
"Colored" drinking fountain, Oklahoma City
African American mother and child, Jefferson, Texas
Vermont farm scene
Easter morning on the Southside of Chicago
Child of migrant worker ironing in camp, near Harlingen, Texas
Family of Victor Rauh, miner, Butte, Montana
Jack Delano and John Collier Jr. · Farm Security Administration
Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, Polish tobacco farmers, Windsor Locks, Connecticut
Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, Polish tobacco farmers (context print)
Children sledding, Haverhill, Massachusetts
"Red" Saunders and his band, Club DeLisa, Chicago
Children and teacher in a Mennonite school, Pennsylvania
Gordon Parks · Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information
Paul Robeson, baritone and activist
Elderly couple at dinner, Lamont Street, Washington D.C.
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Two young girls at Camp Christmas Seals
Esther Bubley and Marion Post Wolcott · Office of War Information / FSA
Waiting room, Greyhound bus terminal, Pittsburgh
Sign at bus terminal, Rome, Georgia
Open-air barber, Mileston, Mississippi
Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, South Carolina
My Shadow, from A Child's Garden of Verses
1952 · The atomic conclusion
The exhibition's final plate — the show's narrative climax — was a large-format hydrogen-bomb image credited to the Atomic Energy Commission. This sourced plate corresponds to Operation Ivy, the first U.S. thermonuclear test at Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands. All U.S. federal government images are public domain (PD-USGov).
Operation Ivy, Mike shot — mushroom cloud, Enewetak Atoll
1943 – 1945 · The Naval Aviation Photographic Unit
The crucible where Steichen — by then in his sixties — built the curatorial method that The Family of Man would inherit. Steichen commanded the unit; Wayne Miller served under him as a combat photographer; both would later collaborate on the 1955 exhibition.
Cmdr Steichen above the deck of USS Lexington
Capt. Steichen photographing children on Guam
Lt. Wayne Miller aboard USS Ticonderoga
1948 – 1961 · The exhibition and its tour
Surviving NARA / USIA installation photographs capturing how Paul Rudolph's 1955 design was re-fabricated for the world tour — five "Lay-out" variants and two "Opening Day" variants — plus Carl Sandburg, author of the prologue distributed as a leaflet to every visitor, a tour-edition image of schoolchildren in the show, and the MoMA premiere venue. All installation photographs are U.S. federal-government works (Department of State / Agency for International Development).
Museum of Modern Art, New York City — premiere venue, January 1955
Tour-edition installation: Rudolph's design re-fabricated by USIA
Tour-edition installation: another venue
Tour-edition installation: another venue
Tour-edition installation: another venue
Tour-edition installation: another venue
Tour-edition installation: another venue
Tour-edition installation: "Opening Day"
Tour-edition installation: another opening
Carl Sandburg, author of the prologue (1955)
Carl Sandburg, poet — earlier portrait
Schoolchildren at a tour-edition installation
1955 – 1962 · The world tour
The Family of Man toured 37 countries and 69 venues across six continents between January 1955 and 1962 (per world-tour research), organised by the U.S. Information Agency. The 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow — which ran concurrently with the show's Soviet visit — became the backdrop for the "Kitchen Debate" between Nixon and Khrushchev. These venue photographs anchor the tour stops documented in the research.
American Exhibition pavilion, Sokolniki Park, Moscow
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Nixon–Khrushchev "Kitchen Debate," American National Exhibition, Moscow
1965 – 1969 · The afterlife begins
Three years after Szarkowski took over MoMA Photography from Steichen, the curatorial succession captured at the 1965 White House Festival of the Arts. Rudolph in his Yale chairmanship years. Barthes — three years after the English translation of Mythologies reached Anglophone reception — at the height of the structuralist moment.
Paul Rudolph, in his Yale chairmanship years
Szarkowski, Joanna and Edward Steichen, White House Festival
Roland Barthes
c. 1885 – 2015 · The Clervaux home
Clervaux Castle and its permanent installation — per Clervaux research: Steichen's personal request that the U.S. donate the last complete touring edition to Luxembourg in 1964; inaugurated 1994, restored 2010 – 2013, listed by UNESCO as Memory of the World in 2003. The 1885 engraving shows the mediaeval castle before the Second World War bombing; later photographs show the restored building hosting the collection.
Château de Clervaux — 19th-century engraving
Clervaux Castle exterior
Permanent installation signage at Clervaux
Clervaux Castle exterior, autumn 2010
Church and Castle of Clervaux
Clervaux Castle — aerial and exterior view
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Clervaux town and castle, 2013
Interior, Clervaux installation (post-restoration)
Interior, Clervaux installation
What this gallery does not show
The 503 photographs of The Family of Man itself are copyrighted by their photographers and estates. This wiki does not host them — see the per-plate photographs index for descriptive entries linking out to the institutions that hold prints (primarily the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre national de l'audiovisuel at Clervaux). When more photographs of the show's making, tour, or afterlife enter the public domain or are released under open licences, they will be added to the gallery in chronological position.
Note on Google Maps images: Google Maps user-contributed photographs are copyright-retained by their uploaders and are not eligible for inclusion. This gallery sources only images with verified PD, CC, or no-known-restrictions status from Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress, or equivalent repositories.