Section

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. Roland Barthes’s 1957 critique — that grouping births and deaths under universal headings “removes History from them, [and] there is nothing more to be said about them” — bears specifically on the curatorial logic of this cluster.3

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

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

  3. Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies (1957) — src-barthes-1957

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