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). See Sections for the overall structure.
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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