Following 'The Family of Man' World Tour: Behind the Scenes of a Traveling Exhibition
Citation
Sánchez González, Emilia. “Following ‘The Family of Man’ World Tour: Behind the Scenes of a Traveling Exhibition.” C²DH News, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg, 3 March 2025. https://www.uni.lu/c2dh-en/news/following-the-family-of-man-world-tour/
Tier justification
Tier 2: institutional news article from the C²DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg), the national centre for digital and contemporary history in Luxembourg and the lead institution for the FoMLEG research programme. The article reports on the January 2025 archival fieldwork phase of the FoMLEG project — visits to the George Eastman Museum, MoMA, and the U.S. National Archives — making it an institutional record of research methodology, not a blog post.
Relevance
Documents the January 2025 on-site archival research phase of FoMLEG, during which researchers visited the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY), MoMA Archives (New York City), and the U.S. National Archives (College Park, MD). These three institutions hold the core primary records for The Family of Man’s world tour — USIA records at NARA (RG 306), MoMA International Program records, and Steichen’s papers at the Eastman Museum. Critically, the article reproduces verbatim image captions from NARA RG 306 photographs, including a 1955 caption naming the West Berlin venue (Hochschule für Bildende Künste) — the only freshly-fetched anchor for that venue produced in any session to date.
Key excerpts / pages
Verbatim image captions captured by direct fetch 2026-05-07:
- Berlin, 1955 (NARA-cited image caption): “German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht crosses from East Berlin to visit ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin, Germany. 1955. Records of the U.S. Information Agency. Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 306-FM-3.”
- Beirut, 1958 (NARA-cited): “Exhibition poster for ‘The Family of Man’ in Beirut, Lebanon, 1958. Courtesy National Archives, no. 306-PPB-7”
Article framing (paraphrased; not directly quoted as the surrounding prose was not extracted verbatim):
- Author: Emilia Sánchez González (Doctoral researcher, C²DH).
- Publication date: 3 March 2025.
- The article reports the FoMLEG team’s January 2025 visits to three institutions: the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY); the Museum of Modern Art Archives (New York City); and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD).
- Specific NARA citations referenced in the article include “Records of the U.S. Information Agency” and reference numbers in the form “306-FM-#” and “306-PPB-#” — the standard Records-Group-306 photographic citation format.
Notes
- Direct fetch 2026-05-07. This entry was previously documented as “page not directly fetched”; the page was successfully retrieved via WebFetch on 2026-05-07 and the Berlin and Beirut image captions were extracted verbatim.
- Significance for the Berlin venue claim. The article carries verbatim text quoting a NARA RG 306 photo caption (306-FM-3) that names the Hochschule für Bildende Künste as the West Berlin venue in 1955. This is the only freshly-fetched anchor for the Berlin venue produced in any session to date. NARA RG 306 itself remains inaccessible to this project’s tooling (denied access in multiple rounds; see
src-nara-rg306-africa-access-barrier). The C²DH article functions as a Tier-3 institutional witness to a Tier-1 primary record — the photo caption it quotes is authored by USIA, not C²DH. - Cited primary archives (per the article’s image attributions). Records of the U.S. Information Agency, NARA, photo no. 306-FM-3 (Berlin Brecht visit, 1955); 306-PPB-7 (Beirut poster, 1958). These are verbatim NARA citations — they do not establish RG 306 access for this project, only that FoMLEG’s researchers accessed those records and published two image captions.
- A future pass should extract the rest of the article’s body text — there were other unquoted captions and prose passages on installation logistics, NARA visitor experience, and the author’s research questions that were not captured verbatim this round.
- The article also lists in narrative regions visited by the touring exhibition (per
src-c2dh-fomleg-lasting-legacy, fetched 2026-05-07): “North America, Europe, and East Asia (Japan and South Korea)” plus “Guatemala, Chile, South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan” and “India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos, Lebanon, Syria” — but no specific city venues for these countries beyond Berlin and Beirut were captioned in the present article. - Perspective: institutional / scholarly-research-in-progress. Companion to
src-c2dh-fomleg-project-pageandsrc-c2dh-fomleg-lasting-legacyand the broader FoMLEG output stream.