Section

Lovers


After the entrance-archway prologue, the exhibition moved into photographs of courting and lovers.1 “Love” is one of the themes explicitly named on CNA Luxembourg’s educational portal as part of its count of 37 themes.2

The boundaries of this cluster are not canonical: the 1955 catalog does not present a numbered table of contents, and different institutional sources parse the same flow into different numbers of sub-themes. This article documents a thematic cluster reconstructed from MoMA’s own narrative summary of the sequence.1 In the MoMA Master Checklist (Exhibition #569, src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist), Section 2 LOVERS is canonical and runs from plate #12 through plate #25 — the 14 photographs listed below.

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. Sandburg’s prose prologue was distributed in full as a leaflet to visitors and reprinted in both editions of the catalog;3 which lines, if any, were placed beside the LOVERS sequence on the gallery wall is a documented open question.

The 14 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-0009 ↔ checklist plate #12) is recorded in each photograph’s catalog notes.

ID Photographer Country Year
photo-0009 Dmitri Kessel China
photo-0010 Ralph Morse England
photo-0011 Robert Doisneau France
photo-0012 Laurence LeGuay New Guinea
photo-0013 Robert Doisneau France
photo-0014 Lou Bernstein USA
photo-0015 Roy De Carava USA
photo-0016 Gotthard Schuh Italy
photo-0017 Robert Doisneau France
photo-0018 David Linton USA
photo-0019 Wayne Miller USA
photo-0020 Louis Faurer USA
photo-0021 Ernst Haas USA
photo-0022 Louis Faurer USA

Showing 14 plates mapped to sec-lovers 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 2 LOVERS is one of the cleaner mappings between the MoMA checklist and this repo’s 11-cluster scheme: the cluster contains exactly the 14 plates the checklist labels Section 2, with no out-of-section borrowings or approximate-fit cases. The mapping certainty in research/sections.md is recorded as canonical.

  1. MoMA Archives, Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955src-moma-archives-highlights-1955 2

  2. CNA Luxembourg, The Family of Man, the book of humanitysrc-cna-education

  3. MoMA, press release for the 1955 exhibition — src-moma-1955-press-release-book. Distribution-as-leaflet is documented there and in src-moma-1955-catalog

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