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
In the MoMA Master Checklist (Exhibition #569, src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist), Section 27 DEATH runs across plates #348–#360 — a contiguous range of 13 plate numbers — with one plate (#358) printed out of numerical order. The 13 photographs listed below are the catalog rows mapped to sec-death-mourning in data/photographs.csv.
Sandburg prologue excerpt
No verbatim Sandburg passage is associated with this section in data/sections.csv. Per the catalog reconciliation work documented in research/sections.md, the 1955 catalog interior text was access-restricted in the Internet Archive scans consulted in earlier sessions and has not been re-fetched. The sandburg_prologue_excerpt field will be populated when the physical catalog or an unrestricted digital copy can be consulted.
Plate gallery
The 13 plates assigned to this cluster, in checklist order. Plate IDs are repository identifiers, not the original 1955 plate numbers; the underlying mapping (e.g. photo-0335 ↔ checklist plate #348) is recorded in each photograph’s catalog notes.
| ID | Photographer | Country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| photo-0335 | Lola Alvarez Bravo | Mexico | — |
| photo-0336 | Robert Halmi | Austria | — |
| photo-0337 | Margaret Bourke-White | Korea | — |
| photo-0338 | Willie Huttig | Germany | — |
| photo-0339 | David Duncan | Saudi Arabia | — |
| photo-0340 | Izis | France | — |
| photo-0341 | Bill Brandt | England | — |
| photo-0342 | Leonti Pjanskoy | Spain | — |
| photo-0343 | Matthew Brady | USA | — |
| photo-0344 | Arnold Maahs | New Guinea | — |
| photo-0345 | Photographer unknown | England | — |
| photo-0346 | May Mirin | USA | — |
| photo-0347 | Manuel Alvarez Bravo | Mexico | — |
Showing 13 plates mapped to sec-death-mourning in data/photographs.csv. Anchor: src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist (MoMA Exhibition #569 master checklist, Tier-1 in-repo).
Cluster boundaries and certainty
Section 27 DEATH is one of the cleaner mappings between the MoMA checklist and this repo’s 11-cluster scheme: the cluster contains exactly the 13 plates the checklist labels Section 27 (with documented checklist gaps), and no plates are borrowed in from neighbouring sections. The mapping certainty in research/sections.md is recorded as canonical. Note that this cluster sits adjacent to the much larger sec-rededication-future (87 plates spanning checklist Sections 28–30 and 36–42), which absorbs several closing-arc sections under approximate, not canonical, mappings — so the boundary between “Death and mourning” and “Rededication, peace, and the future” is precise on the early side (Section 27 ↔ Section 28 transition is a clean hand-off) but coarse on the later side.
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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. ↩