Death and mourning
Death is one of the exhibition’s canonical late-flow clusters. MoMA’s archives-highlights summary names “Death” as a discrete stage in the narrative progression before the rededication sequence on children and new life.1
Roland Barthes, writing in 1957, makes this section the core of his critique: “to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing. For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledge … whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth [and death].”2 Eric Sandeen (1995) reconstructs how the exhibition’s death sequence was built and how it functioned within the humanist argument of the whole, and is the standard Tier-2 anchor for interpretive readings of this cluster.3
-
MoMA Archives, Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955 —
src-moma-archives-highlights-1955. ↩ -
Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies (1957) —
src-barthes-1957. ↩ -
Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (University of New Mexico Press, 1995) —
src-sandeen-1995. ↩