Marriage and childbirth
Following the lovers sequence, the exhibition turned to marriage and to childbirth — a theme MoMA’s archives-highlights page names directly in its summary of the flow,1 and which the CNA education portal includes in its enumeration of the exhibition’s themes.2
This grouping is a thematic cluster; “marriage and childbirth” is not a verbatim heading from the 1955 catalog, which does not present its sequencing as titled sections. In the MoMA Master Checklist (Exhibition #569, src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist), the equivalent named sections are MARRIAGE (Section 3, plates #26–#32), PREGNANCY (Section 4, plates #33–#41), CHILDBIRTH (Section 5, plates #42–#44), and BIRTHS (Section 7, plates #48–#50). These four have been collapsed into this single cluster following the MoMA archive summary’s narrative logic. Note that Section 6 NURSING MOTHERS (#45–#47) was assigned instead to sec-family-children because it precedes rather than follows the Birth cluster in the checklist.
Roland Barthes’s 1957 critique bears specifically on the curatorial logic of grouping marriage and birth under universal headings. Barthes framed the exhibition’s premise as the assertion that “birth, death, work, knowledge, play, always impose the same types of behaviour; there is a family of Man,” and judged this “myth of the human ‘condition’” to “[rest] on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.”3
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 22 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-0023 ↔ checklist plate #26) is recorded in each photograph’s catalog notes.
| ID | Photographer | Country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| photo-0023 | Robert Capa | Czechoslovakia | — |
| photo-0024 | Frank Horvat | India | — |
| photo-0025 | Hans Malmberg | Sweden | — |
| photo-0026 | Wayne Miller | Mexico | — |
| photo-0027 | Werner Bischof | Japan | — |
| photo-0028 | Henri Cartier-Bresson | France | — |
| photo-0029 | Jay Te Winburn | USA | — |
| photo-0030 | Paul Himmel | USA | — |
| photo-0031 | Robert Frank | USA | — |
| photo-0032 | George Rodger | Kordofan | — |
| photo-0033 | Margery Lewis | USA | — |
| photo-0034 | Elliott Erwitt | USA | — |
| photo-0035 | Hideo Haga | Japan | — |
| photo-0036 | Manuel Alvarez Bravo | Mexico | — |
| photo-0037 | Robert Frank | USA | — |
| photo-0038 | Richard Harrington | Arctic | — |
| photo-0039 | Wayne Miller | USA | — |
| photo-0040 | Wayne Miller | USA | — |
| photo-0041 | Wayne Miller | USA | — |
| photo-0045 | Dorothea Lange | USA | — |
| photo-0046 | R. Diament | USSR | — |
| photo-0047 | Elliott Erwitt | USA | — |
Showing 22 plates mapped to sec-marriage-birth in data/photographs.csv. Anchor: src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist (MoMA Exhibition #569 master checklist, Tier-1 in-repo).
Cluster boundaries and certainty
The cluster mapping is canonical per research/sections.md. It collapses four adjacent checklist sections (3 Marriage, 4 Pregnancy, 5 Childbirth, 7 Births) into a single landing-page cluster in order to keep this repo’s 11-cluster scheme aligned with the MoMA narrative summary. The collapsed mapping is explicitly documented and does not assert that Steichen treated these as a single thematic unit — only that they form a natural arc in the checklist progression. The cluster is bounded on the early side by Section 2 LOVERS (mapped to sec-lovers) and on the later side by Section 6 NURSING MOTHERS, which is mapped to sec-family-children.