Zombie Humanism, Generative AI Images, and Photography
Citation
Lewandowski, Helen. “Zombie Humanism, Generative AI Images, and Photography.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 2 (Fall 2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.19237. URL: https://journalpanorama.org/article/zombie-humanism/
PDF: https://journalpanorama.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Lewandowski-Zombie-Humanism.pdf
DOAJ record: https://doaj.org/article/02fed309b7ec43ff87d5878ed68aeab9
Tier justification
Tier 3: this article appears in the Panorama “Digital Dialogues” section, which is editor-reviewed rather than peer-reviewed at the article level (Panorama’s peer-reviewed feature track is separate). The journal as a whole is a DOAJ-indexed, AHAA / University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing scholarly venue, but the article’s specific section does not clear the Tier-2 peer-review-at-article-level bar. Tier-3 is the appropriate classification: named scholar (Lewandowski), stable DOI, DOAJ-indexed open-access publication, scholarly-press production. Demoted from Tier-2 per credibility-judge review on PR #127 (2026-05-07).
Relevance
The article examines the long critical afterlife of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man in the context of generative AI image-making, focusing on the Flickr Foundation’s “A Flickr of Humanity” New Curators Programme and its third volume, A Generated Family of Man (2023), which regenerated the FoM catalogue using Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator. Lewandowski uses this AI project as a lens to examine what she calls “zombie humanism” — the persistence of FoM’s universalist humanist ideology in post-photographic image-generation. The article is the only identified 2020s scholarly English-language article (DOAJ-indexed, editor-reviewed in Panorama’s Digital Dialogues section) that directly addresses both The Family of Man and generative AI, making it a unique contribution to the digital-turn chapter of FoM’s reception history.
The Flickr Foundation project it reviews (published October 2023) is documented at: https://www.flickr.org/programs/new-curators/a-flickr-of-humanity/
Key excerpts / pages
PDF retrieved by curl on 2026-05-09 from https://journalpanorama.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Lewandowski-Zombie-Humanism.pdf and read in full (10 pages, including notes). All quotations below are verbatim from that retrieved PDF.
-
Citation block on the cover page (verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “Helen Lewandowski, ‘Zombie Humanism, Generative AI Images, and Photography,’ review of A Generated Family of Man, Flickr Foundation, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 2 (Fall 2024), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.19237.”
-
Article subtitle (cover page, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “Review of A Generated Family of Man / By the Flickr Foundation / London: Flickr Foundation, 2023, https://archive.org/details/a-generated-family-of-man / Reviewed by: Helen Lewandowski.”
-
Opening summary of the canonical critical reception (p. 1, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “Critique of The Family of Man and its themes seems to return like clockwork every few years—each endeavoring to offer new insight on the subject. First shown from January 24 to May 8, 1955, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the exhibition curated by Edward Steichen intended to reveal the commonalities between peoples across the world through (mostly documentary and photojournalistic) photography. Part of The Family of Man’s enduring influence rests, however, not only on its public impact as a successful touring exhibition (on permanent display in Luxembourg since 1994) but also as a heuristic device for critiquing photography as a whole. In 1956, Roland Barthes appraised this type of humanist photography as a conservative abstraction that naturalized insidious elements of this ‘family’; in 1981, Allan Sekula dissected ‘the oft-repeated claim that photography constitutes a “universal language”’; in 2004, Abigail Solomon-Godeau viewed its permanent display as ‘a kind of Benetton ad’ with advertising co-opting this ‘representational work’; in the 2010s, Ariella Azoulay provided a critical rehabilitation of the exhibition, arguing that it should be understood by its multiplicity and global citizenry. The list goes on.”
-
Why return to FoM in the 2020s (p. 1–2, verbatim): “Why return once more to The Family of Man in the 2020s? Surely, nearly seventy years after the opening of the 1955 exhibition, the beloved punching bag of photographic critique could be replaced with something else—is there anything new to say about it? As Flickr arrives at its twentieth anniversary, the waning digital photographic depository seems concerned about cementing its legacy. Their new foundation has made The Family of Man the centerpiece of their New Curators Program, with three ‘A Flickr of Humanity’ volumes ‘reinhabiting’ the exhibition’s catalogue, with projects produced by university students in the United States and the United Kingdom.”
-
The “zombie humanism” thesis (p. 6, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “Twenty-first-century humanism has focused on neoliberal individualism, subjectivity, and first-person narratives, emphasizing the voices of both subject and author. While this humanist resurgence may be criticized as merely gestural, the subsequent images produced by programs like DALL-E and Midjourney artificially reanimate this digitally overrepresented 2010s culture, a mixture of scraped photographs from search engines, social-media platforms, and stock photography. This is what I would term ‘zombie humanism,’ incidentally producing the same commercially motivated ‘everyday’ tropes but presenting them untethered from historical, political, or photographic contexts (a nineteenth-century Alice Liddell revivified through Tumblr; a 1940s dead soldier transmorphed into a 2010s influencer).”
-
Use of Barthes (p. 7, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “A reference to Roland Barthes’s punctum in the prologue by Fattori McKenna is critical of generative AI’s hollow imagery but is ultimately misapplied. It is not that there is some elusive, specific aesthetic detail in a photograph that causes a personal, emotional ‘prick’ to the viewer (not all, or many, photographs will have a punctum for the viewer). It is the fact that these images are not photographs; there is no punctum or even studium (a detached political, cultural, or historical interest in a photograph). Generative AI images may aspire to visually resemble photographs, but crucially they have no medium-specific relationship to reality (‘the Photograph is pure contingency and can be nothing else,’ in the Barthesian view). Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘Death of the Author’ might be a more relevant though flippant reference; the catalogue’s afterword (a reprinted article from Lawfare, not written for the project) by Flickr’s board chair Ryan Merkley repeats the argument continually made by tech companies that AI is a ‘transformative use’ of materials, which elude the author’s ownership.”
-
Closing diagnosis (p. 7, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “Rather than a Braidottian understanding of posthumanism, liberated from the conservative and anthropocentric humanism associated with postwar humanist photography, there is instead a risk of further entrenching harmful humanist biases, reifying what people want to see or believe. This is neither a return to the ‘old humanist institutions that created the conditions for greater equality,’ which Stimson reminisced about, nor Azoulay’s reformed humanism, which rejects postwar humanism’s implicit white colonial man in favor of the heroic figure of the citizen. Instead, generative AI’s zombie humanism is, at best, as per Barthes’s 1956 text, a further naturalization of ingrained human biases. At worst, however, it inhabits the visual signifiers of humanism while actively discrediting the photojournalistic corpus that documents our shared human history.”
-
Author affiliation (p. 7, verbatim): “Helen Lewandowski is a PhD graduate of The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.”
-
Tour and Luxembourg note (p. 7, footnote 1, verbatim, fetched 2026-05-09): “The Family of Man toured museums in the United States until 1958 and was acquired by the United States Information Agency for international touring until 1963. Four touring ‘copies’ were produced and visited thirty-seven countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Cuba, France, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Laos, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. One touring copy of the exhibition was presented to the Government of Luxembourg for a permanent display at the Common Market Headquarters in 1965. […] Since 1994, Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg has displayed this touring copy of The Family of Man as a permanent exhibition, which entered into the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme in 2003.”
Notes
- Direct fetch 2026-05-09 (cache file:
.scratch/lewandowski-2024-zombie-humanism.pdf, 4.5 MB). Promotion toverified: truereflects in-session reading of the full 10-page PDF. The previously recorded WebSearch summaries from 2026-05-07 (which were the only basis for the earlierverified: falsestate) have been replaced by verbatim text retrieved by curl 2026-05-09. - The Flickr Foundation project A Generated Family of Man (George Oates, Juwon Jung, Maya Osaka; published October 2023; archived at https://archive.org/details/a-generated-family-of-man) is the primary object of the article’s critique and could become a separate source entry in a future pass.
- Note on Barthes dating: Lewandowski’s article gives “1956” for Barthes’s commentary in the opening paragraph (p. 1) and footnote 2 (p. 8) cites Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 196–99. The original French Mythologies publication is 1957; the essay had earlier appeared in Les Lettres nouvelles in 1956. Lewandowski’s “1956” therefore refers to the original essay’s first appearance, not to a misattributed Mythologies publication date.
- The Tenth Anniversary Issue (vol. 10, no. 2) is confirmed at https://journalpanorama.org/article/special-anniversary-issue-10-2/. The article appears in this issue.
- Cross-reference:
src-c2dh-fomleg(FoMLEG project, which also addresses digital approaches to FoM reception);src-takenaka-2022-atomic-bombings(2020s peer-reviewed scholarship on FoM).