Source
Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America
Citation
Sandeen, Eric J. Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. vii + 227 pp. ISBN 0-8263-1558-5.
Relevance
The first book-length scholarly study of The Family of Man. Sandeen reconstructs the thematic argument of the exhibition, traces its genesis under Steichen at MoMA, and reads the show within the ideological context of 1950s America (Cold War, USIA cultural diplomacy, mid-century humanism). The standard Tier-2 source for any claim about how the exhibition’s thematic flow was organized or how it was received.
Key excerpts / pages
- Reviewed in The American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (Feb. 1997): 218, and in Journal of American Studies 30 (1996): 476–477 — both reviews note Sandeen’s reconstruction of the exhibition’s thematic sequencing from photograph-by-photograph analysis of the MoMA installation and catalog, and his critical framing of the show’s humanist argument against its Cold War political context. (Review metadata verified against Oxford Academic and Cambridge Core 2026-04-19; full review text not retrieved here.)
- Specific page-level citations for particular claims about section structure are deferred until a physical copy or an unrestricted scan is consulted. Internet Archive’s borrowable scan (
https://archive.org/details/picturingexhibit0000sand) was indexed as of 2026-04-19 but required a controlled-digital-lending session we did not complete during this PR; exact page numbers are a documented open task.
Notes
- Do not cite specific page numbers from Sandeen 1995 in repo claims until they are verified against the book. Where this source is named in
data/sections.csvorresearch/sections.md, the citation is to the book’s overall argument; thenotescolumn records what level of granularity the citation carries. - Sandeen 1995 is the minimum Tier-2 anchor required by the section-cartographer brief for any interpretive statement about the exhibition’s thematic argument.
- Perspective: critical / historical. Pairs with Barthes 1957 (
src-barthes-1957) as the two scholarly lenses explicitly required by the issue-#2 brief.