Source
Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955 (Archives Highlights)
Citation
Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955.” Archives Highlights. Accessed 2026-04-19. https://www.moma.org/research/archives/archives-highlights-06-1955
Relevance
A MoMA-hosted archival summary of the 1955 exhibition, published by MoMA’s archives department. Confirms institutional-level facts (dates, 503 photographs, 273 photographers, 68 countries, ~270,000 NYC attendance) and offers one institutional parsing of the exhibition’s narrative flow (prologue/crowd → lovers → childbirth → household → careers → death → bomb → children/new life), ending with Smith’s A Walk to Paradise Garden. Used in data/sections.csv as the MoMA-institutional anchor for the sequencing reconstruction.
Key excerpts / pages
- Exhibition dates: January 24 – May 8, 1955.
- 503 photographs, 273 photographers, 68 countries.
- Curator: Edward Steichen, assisted by Wayne Miller.
- Installation design: Paul Rudolph, using temporary walls and print sizes ranging from 24 × 36 cm to 300 × 400 cm.
- Narrative progression summarized as: entrance archway with crowd imagery → lovers → childbirth → household life → careers → death → H-bomb → return to children / new life, closing on W. Eugene Smith’s A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946).
- Steichen quote cited on the page: “The people in the audience looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.”
- Sandburg prologue line cited on the page: “The first cry of a baby in Chicago, or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, ‘I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the Family.’”
Notes
- The Wikipedia article on The Family of Man uses essentially the same Sandburg line. Wikipedia’s footnote citation for the line was not reachable in our check; treat the MoMA archives-highlights page as the Tier-1 anchor for the Sandburg line until a page-level citation from the 1955 catalog itself is added.
- The narrative progression listed above is MoMA’s own parsing; it is not the catalog’s table of contents. Other institutional counters (UNESCO: 32 themes; CNA education: 37 themes) parse the same flow more granularly. Our repo treats all three parsings as institutional perspectives on the same underlying sequence.
- Perspective: institutional / curatorial.