Untitled
This wiki does not host exhibition photographs — each is copyrighted by its photographer or estate. See the image policy.
The story
Drawn from research/photographs/photo-0097.md — the canonical research note. Provenance and primary-source documentation live there; this is the reader-friendly summary.
Subject and context
Per the MoMA Master Checklist, plate #103 is placed in Section 11, Children (B), set in the U.S.A. The checklist does not describe the subject. Given Page’s documented Guggenheim project (1949–1950) of photographing “people on the streets of New York City” — with subjects who “appear unaware of his presence” (verbatim from src-wikipedia-homer-page-pointer, fetched 2026-05-09 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Page, saved to .scratch/wikipedia-homer-page.html) — it is consistent that this plate depicts children in an American urban setting, but this is not confirmed at the plate level.
Page studied art and social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley (graduating 1940) and was encouraged into photography by his neighbor Dorothea Lange in 1944 (per src-wikipedia-homer-page-pointer). His 1947 “major show” at MoMA (Wikipedia’s wording, src-wikipedia-homer-page-pointer; pointer-only, Tier-3) predates the Family of Man by eight years and establishes his institutional relationship with the museum.
Section 11 Children (B) runs between Section 10 Family Activities and Section 12 Fathers and Sons in the checklist sequence. The section is part of the exhibition’s extended mid-sequence treatment of childhood — a thematic cluster that the MoMA archives-highlights summary (src-moma-archives-highlights-1955, Tier-1, in-repo) describes as following childbirth and household life in the exhibition’s narrative arc.
Reception / analysis
No plate-specific critical reception is documented in any source consulted this round. The general humanist-universalist framing of the Children sections of The Family of Man is addressed in Barthes’s 1957 essay “The Great Family of Man” (src-barthes-1957, Tier-2, in-repo), which argues that the exhibition naturalizes historically contingent human arrangements — including “birth, death, work” — as eternal universals, thereby suppressing political difference. Barthes’s critique applies to the Children sequences as a class, not to individual plates.
Perspective notes
- Curatorial (MoMA 1955): plate #103 placed in the Children (B) block, one of ten Page contributions to the exhibition. Page’s ten-plate representation makes him one of the more heavily featured photographers in the exhibition by plate count.
- Critical: no individual-plate criticism found this round. The Wikipedia source (
src-wikipedia-homer-page-pointer) notes Page’s work was “largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1985” — placing him in a different institutional standing from better-known photographers like Cartier-Bresson or Smith in the same exhibition.
Open questions
- Specific date, location, and subject of plate #103.
- Whether plate #103 derives from Page’s 1949–1950 Guggenheim year or from a different assignment.
- Current location of the print; whether it is among the Clervaux Castle holdings.
- Whether MoMA’s permanent collection holds the print with a recorded object ID.
- ICP returned 404 for
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/homer-page(verified 2026-05-09); MoMA artist page returned 403. No Tier-1 institutional archive page for Page was successfully fetched this round.
Catalog notes
Checklist #103, Section 11 Children (B). Homer Page, American, 14 x 16 1/2 cm. First of seven Page plates in the checklist (see also #126, #157, #158, #170, #176 in this batch).
src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist