Prologue
The exhibition opened with an entrance archway and crowd imagery, a visual prelude that asked visitors to see themselves as one among many before entering the thematic sequence that followed.1 Carl Sandburg’s prologue — the source of the exhibition’s title, drawn from his 1944 poem The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany — was distributed in full to visitors as a leaflet and reprinted in both the paperback and deluxe editions of the 1955 catalog.2 Its closing sentence, quoted in MoMA’s June 21, 1955 press release, reads: “A camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven of fun, mystery and holiness — here is the Family of Man.”2
This article treats the prologue as a thematic cluster rather than as a canonical numbered section; the 1955 catalog does not label its sections numerically, and institutional counts of the exhibition’s themes differ (UNESCO lists 32; the CNA Luxembourg education portal lists 37).3 See Sections for the overall structure.
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 8 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-0001 ↔ checklist plate #1) is recorded in each photograph’s catalog notes.
| ID | Photographer | Country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| photo-0001 | Lick Observatory | USA | — |
| photo-0002 | Wynn Bullock | USA | 1954 |
| photo-0003 | from "Art in the Ice Age" | France | — |
| photo-0004 | Nat Farbman | Belgian Congo | — |
| photo-0005 | Wynn Bullock | USA | 1951 |
| photo-0006 | Harry Callahan | USA | — |
| photo-0007 | Pat English | England | — |
| photo-0008 | Eugene Harris | Peru | — |
Showing 8 plates mapped to sec-prologue 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 1 PROLOGUE is a canonical checklist section in src-moma-exh-0569-master-checklist. The 8 photographs assigned here (plates #1–#11A with documented gaps at #5, #7, #8, #11) are those mapped to sec-prologue in data/photographs.csv. Gaps at #5, #7, #8, and the bare slot #11 are documented missing numbers in the current catalog; the Eugene Harris Peruvian flute-player image is roweed separately as #11A. The certainty of this mapping is canonical per research/sections.md.
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MoMA Archives, Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955 —
src-moma-archives-highlights-1955. ↩ -
Museum of Modern Art, press release for the book editions of The Family of Man, June 21, 1955 —
src-moma-1955-press-release-book; The Family of Man, Edward Steichen (ed.), MoMA, 1955 —src-moma-1955-catalog. ↩ ↩2 -
UNESCO Memory of the World register, 2003 —
src-unesco-mow-2003; CNA Luxembourg, The Family of Man, the book of humanity —src-cna-education. ↩