The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age
Citation
Hurm, Gerd, Anke Reitz, and Shamoon Zamir, eds. The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. 336 pp. ISBN 978-1-78453-967-2.
Tier justification
Tier 2: essay collection published by I.B. Tauris (academic press, now part of Bloomsbury Academic) with named scholarly editors and contributors. The volume originated in a conference hosted by CNA Luxembourg (“The Family of Man in the 21st Century: Reassessing an Epochal Exhibition”) and is promoted by the CNA as the principal scholarly companion to the Clervaux collection.
Relevance
The most recent book-length critical reassessment of The Family of Man, bringing together ten scholars to re-examine the exhibition’s argument, curatorial logic, international reception, and global afterlives. The CNA Luxembourg documentation page explicitly associates this volume with the exhibition’s contemporary scholarly standing. The editors are Gerd Hurm (also the author of the German-language Steichen biography held by the CNA, src-hurm-steichen-bio-deu), Anke Reitz, and Shamoon Zamir. Contributors include several major voices in the reception history of the show (including Eric Sandeen, who is also the author of the 1995 monograph src-sandeen-1995, and Martin Jay).
Key excerpts / pages
No page-level quotations are recorded here. Metadata confirmed from two session-fetched sources on 2026-04-30:
- CNA documentation page (English):
https://steichencollections-cna.lu/eng/documentations/4_publication-the-family-of-man-revisited-photography-in-a-global-age - CNA documentation page (French):
https://steichencollections-cna.lu/fra/documentations/4_publication-the-family-of-man-revisited-photography-in-a-global-age
Metadata confirmed session-this-round:
- Title: The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age
- Editors: Gerd Hurm, Anke Reitz, Shamoon Zamir
- Publisher: I.B. Tauris
- Year: 2018
- ISBN: 978-1-78453-967-2
- Pages: 336
- Language: English
Contributors listed on CNA page: Winfried Fluck, Ulrike Gehring, Gerd Hurm, Martin Jay, Miles Orvell, Anke Reitz, Eric Sandeen, Kerstin Schmidt, Werner Sollors, Shamoon Zamir
Primary historical documents included (per CNA page description): commentary by Max Horkheimer and Wolfgang Koeppen; a letter by August Sander; poems by Witold Wirpsza.
Framing language on CNA page: “The most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography” (institutional characterization used on the CNA page; not an independent verification of that claim).
Fresh fetch 2026-05-09 — full editorial blurb verbatim
Re-fetched via curl 2026-05-09 (HTTP 200, cached locally during the recep-2010s session). The CNA documentation page carries the publisher’s editorial blurb in full; previously only the contributor list and primary-document inventory had been transcribed. Verbatim:
- “The Family of Man: Photography in a Global Age revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthes’s influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichen’s work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, a letter from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe, and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it is timely to revisit The Family of Man.”
The phrasing “for the first time in English” used in the reception-2010s essay (research/reception-2010s-turner-era.md) is the essay’s compression of the blurb’s “Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English”; the blurb’s full sentence is the verbatim source.
Notes
- CNA Luxembourg hosts the publication through its e-shop and presents this volume as the principal scholarly companion to the Clervaux permanent collection. The CNA’s association with the volume gives it additional institutional standing in the Luxembourg chapter of the exhibition’s reception.
- The I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury Academic catalog and the Taylor & Francis / Routledge DOI for this volume (DOI 10.4324/9781315159942, attempted 2026-04-30) were both denied by the WebFetch permission system this round; all metadata derives from the two CNA documentation pages listed above.
- Body text not read this round. No page-specific quotations are recorded.
- A future pass should fetch the Routledge/Bloomsbury catalog page directly or via a library proxy to confirm the DOI and retrieve individual chapter titles.
- Perspective: critical / historical, with global-reception emphasis. The most recent book-length companion to
src-sandeen-1995.