The Family of Man — CNA Luxembourg educational portal
Citation
Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg. “The Family of Man, the book of humanity.” Educational portal accompanying the permanent installation at Clervaux Castle. Accessed 2026-04-19. https://www.thefamilyofman.education/en/historical-context/the-family-of-man-the-book-of-humanity
Relevance
The CNA is the institutional custodian of the original prints of The Family of Man, permanently installed at Clervaux Castle since 1994. Its educational portal is an institutional Tier-1 source and is one of the places that publishes a count of “37 themes” for the exhibition’s thematic organization — conflicting with UNESCO’s (2003) figure of 32. Useful both as a list-of-themes signal and as an indicator of the counting discrepancy across institutional sources.
Key excerpts / pages
- Themes explicitly named (not exhaustive): “love, childbirth, work, family, education, childhood, war, peace.”
- “37 themes like a photo-essay about human development and cycles of life.”
- “Steichen approached the exhibition like an editor of illustrated magazines.”
- “a linear route … different sizes of prints displayed at different levels in the room and sometimes removed from the walls to be set on the floor or hung from the ceiling.”
- Sandburg, quoted as: “There is one man in the world and his name is All man.” (The CNA site reproduces a shortened form; the longer attested opening lines are found quoted separately in press and secondary literature.)
- Steichen quoted: “[The Family of Man] was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” (matches the MoMA June 21, 1955 press release)
Notes
- The CNA education portal enumerates a partial, illustrative list of themes but does not publish a canonical numbered list of all 37. Until a primary enumeration is confirmed (either from the 1955 catalog’s sequencing or from CNA’s exhibition-room signage), any repo claim of “37 sections with titles X, Y, Z” would be a fabrication.
- Perspective: institutional / curatorial (CNA inherits Steichen’s framing).