The Family of Man [photography column review — NYT]
Citation
Deschin, Jacob. [Review of The Family of Man.] The New York Times, 1955. [Exact date, section, page number NOT confirmed this round.]
Tier justification
Tier 3: named-author review in the New York Times, which is explicitly named in the Tier 3 definition as a ‘newspaper of record with named authors.’ Jacob Deschin was the NYT’s photography critic. Attribution drawn from the Wikipedia article on The Family of Man (fetched 2026-04-30). No independent access to the original article was obtained this session.
Relevance
Jacob Deschin served as the New York Times photography critic and wrote about the exhibition from the perspective of the photography community rather than the art-world. Wikipedia’s article on The Family of Man (fetched 2026-04-30) characterises Deschin’s position as viewing the show as ‘an editorial achievement rather than a photography exhibition’ — a framing that distinguishes the curatorial conception (a photo-essay organised around a thesis) from the photographic artistry of individual works. This is a significant critical distinction that maps onto the internal photography-community debate documented in Aperture 3, no. 2 (1955) (src-aperture-1955-controversial). Deschin’s review represents the institutional NYT photography criticism voice, as distinct from the art criticism of Aline B. Saarinen in the same paper (src-saarinen-1955-nyt).
Key excerpts / pages
- Wikipedia’s article on The Family of Man (fetched 2026-04-30) attributes to Deschin the characterisation that the exhibition was ‘an editorial achievement rather than a photography exhibition.’ (This paraphrase comes from Wikipedia’s article text, NOT from a direct fetch of the NYT article. The original article was not read in this session.)
- Exact date, section, and page number: NOT confirmed this round.
- URL: blank — NYT TimesMachine and ProQuest were not accessed this session.
Notes
- Flagged
verified: falsebecause the original article was not fetched or read in this session. - Jacob Deschin: confirmed via context as the NYT photography critic during this period. He is listed as a judge in the Popular Photography October 1955 photo contest advertisement (confirmed from direct OCR text access of
sim_popular-photography_1955-10_37_4, fetched 2026-04-30) — evidence of his prominence in the US photography world. No Wikipedia article on Jacob Deschin exists (404 returned, fetched 2026-04-30). - The NYT in 1955 had at minimum two critics writing about visual culture: Aline B. Saarinen (art critic, writing about the exhibition’s implications for art history —
src-saarinen-1955-nyt) and Jacob Deschin (photography critic). The two reviews may have appeared on different dates and in different sections; both are cited as contemporaneous primary reception sources. - Howard Devree (1890–1966) was the NYT art critic from 1947–1959 (confirmed via Wikipedia article on Devree, fetched 2026-04-30). It is plausible that he also reviewed the exhibition, but no Devree review of the Family of Man was confirmed in any source fetched this session.
- To verify: access the NYT TimesMachine or ProQuest Historical Newspapers for January–May 1955. Search specifically for Jacob Deschin’s photography column (likely in the Sunday NYT Magazine section) for reviews of the exhibition.