Rededication, peace, and the future
The exhibition closed by returning to children and new life. MoMA’s archives-highlights summary names W. Eugene Smith’s A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946) as the closing photograph, placed after the H-bomb image as a deliberate turn from apocalypse back to the possibility of the future.1 The CNA education portal lists “peace” among the exhibition’s themes.2
As with every other cluster on this index, the closing sequence is not a verbatim section heading from the 1955 catalog — it is a thematic cluster reconstructed from MoMA’s and CNA’s institutional summaries. The critical literature (Barthes 1957; Sandeen 1995) reads this closing move as the exhibition’s humanist resolution, and contests whether that resolution does the political work the curatorial framing claims for it.3
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MoMA Archives, Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955 —
src-moma-archives-highlights-1955. ↩ -
CNA Luxembourg, The Family of Man, the book of humanity —
src-cna-education. ↩ -
Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies (1957) —
src-barthes-1957; Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (U. of New Mexico Press, 1995) —src-sandeen-1995. ↩