The Family of Man — MoMA Exhibition #569 Master Checklist
Citation
Museum of Modern Art. The Family of Man, 1955–56 — An exhibition prepared and circulated by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Check List. MoMA Exhibition #569. Archival document, 26 pp. Available in MoMA’s Exhibition Master Checklists archive. Accessed 2026-04-19. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/archives/ExhMasterChecklists/MoMAExh_0569_MasterChecklist.pdf
Relevance
The institutional primary source listing every checklist entry in The Family of Man, grouped by its internal thematic sections and numbered in the sequence used for the circulating (international-tour) edition. Each entry gives a checklist number, the geographic location “where taken,” the photographer’s name, the agency or publication if applicable, the photographer’s nationality, and the print dimensions in centimeters. Captions and quotation panels are interleaved as separate entries (“Caption 1,” “Caption 2,” etc.) and are keyed by install under #N or install by #N, making their physical placement reconstructable. This is the anchor document for any claim about plate-level attribution in the exhibition.
Key excerpts / pages
Section 1: Prologue (pp. 1)
- 1 — U.S.A. — Lick Observatory — 120 × 89
- 2 — U.S.A. — Wynn Bullock, American — 50 × 63
- 3 — France — from “Art in the Ice Age” — 20 × 17
- 4 — Belgian Congo — Nat Farbman, LIFE, American — 20 × 17
- 6 — U.S.A. — Wynn Bullock, American — 140 × 177
- 9 — U.S.A. — Harry Callahan, American — 24 × 23
- 10 — England — Pat English, LIFE, American — 2 panels (104 × 26; 33 × 114)
- 11A — Peru — Eugene Harris, POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY, American — 14 × 18
- Caption 1: Carl Sandburg, “There is only one man in the world…” — 36 × 72
(Checklist numbers 5, 7, 8 are not used in the Prologue section of this document; the numbering in the checklist as issued skips them. Whether this reflects a withdrawn plate, a reserved number, or an internal edit is not stated in the document.)
Section 2: Lovers (pp. 1–2)
- 12 — China — Dmitri Kessel, LIFE, American
- 13 — England — Ralph Morse, LIFE, American
- 14 — France — Robert Doisneau, Rapho Guillumette (agency), French
- 15 — New Guinea — Laurence LeGuay, Australian
- 16 — France — Robert Doisneau, Rapho Guillumette (agency), French
- 17 — U.S.A. — Lou Bernstein, American
- 18 — U.S.A. — Roy De Carava, American
- 19 — Italy — Gotthard Schuh, Swiss
- 20 — France — Robert Doisneau, Rapho Guillumette (agency), French
- 21 — U.S.A. — David Linton, American
- 22 — U.S.A. — Wayne Miller, American
- 23 — U.S.A. — Louis Faurer, American
- 24 — U.S.A. — Ernst Haas, Magnum, Austrian
- 25 — U.S.A. — Louis Faurer, American
- Caption 2 (install under #19): James Joyce, “…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes…”
Section 3: Marriage (p. 2)
- 26 — Czechoslovakia — Robert Capa, Magnum, American
- 27 — India — Frank Horvat, Black Star, Italian
- 28 — Sweden — Hans Malmberg, Swedish
- 29 — Mexico — Wayne Miller, LIFE, American
- 30 — Japan — Werner Bischof, Magnum, Swiss
- 31 — France — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Magnum, French
- 32 — U.S.A. — Jay Te Winburn, VOGUE, American
- Caption 3 (install to top left of #27): Pueblo Indian, “We shall be one person.”
Section 4: Pregnancy (pp. 2–3)
- 33 — U.S.A. — Paul Himmel, American
- 34 — U.S.A. — Robert Frank, Swiss
- 35 — Kordofan — George Rodger, Magnum, British
- 36 — U.S.A. — Margery Lewis, American
- 37 — U.S.A. — Elliott Erwitt, Magnum, American
- 38 — Japan — Hideo Haga, Japanese
- 39 — Mexico — Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexican
- 40 — U.S.A. — Robert Frank, Swiss
- 41 — Arctic — Richard Harrington, Three Lions, Canadian
Section 5: Childbirth (p. 3)
- 42 — U.S.A. — Wayne Miller, American
- 43 — U.S.A. — Wayne Miller, American
- 44 — U.S.A. — Wayne Miller, American
- Caption 4 (install under #44): Scriabin, “The universe resounds with the joyful cry I am…”
Section 6: Nursing Mothers (p. 3)
- 45 — Holland — Nico Jesse, Dutch
- 46 — U.S.A. — Nell Dorr, American
- 47 — U.S.A. — Wayne Miller, American
- Caption 5 (install under #46): Euripides, “And shall not loveliness be loved forever?”
Section 7: Births (p. 3)
- 48 — U.S.A. — Dorothea Lange, American
- 49 — U.S.S.R. — R. Diament, Moscow Journalists Club, Russian
- 50 — U.S.A. — Elliott Erwitt, Magnum, American
Notes
- This is the checklist for the circulating / international-tour edition (header: “1955–56 — An exhibition prepared and circulated by The Museum of Modern Art”). The MoMA-New-York opening run and the circulating run are understood to share the 503-plate core (
src-moma-archives-highlights-1955,src-moma-exh-2429). Per-plate variations for specific tour stops — e.g., USIA versions going abroad — may exist and are separately documented in National Archives RG 306 (not yet consulted). - The checklist does not record photograph titles. Per the CNA educational portal, Steichen “took the pictures out of their context, deprived them from their title, their date or any mention about their original place” (
src-cna-education). Where a work later acquired a known title in the photographer’s catalogue raisonné (e.g., Wynn Bullock’s Let There Be Light, 1951, or Child in Forest, 1951), that title is attested by secondary institutional sources rather than by the MoMA checklist itself, and is noted case-by-case indata/photographs.csv. - The checklist does not record dates of the photographs. Years that appear in
data/photographs.csvare sourced from additional Tier-1/2 references (MoMA collection records; photographer-estate holdings at Center for Creative Photography etc.); a blank year means no Tier-1/2 date was retrievable at this time. - “American” is the checklist’s own nationality convention when the photographer was a U.S. resident at the time, including photographers who emigrated and were naturalized. For example, Robert Capa (born Endre Friedmann, Hungarian) is recorded by MoMA as “American”; our CSV preserves the checklist’s attribution and flags it in
noteswhere scholarly convention differs. - Perspective: institutional / curatorial / archival. This is the museum’s own working document, and it inherits the curatorial framing of its moment.