a substantial portion of his collection in 1949, which
marked the beginnings of their photography collec-
tion. Shortly after MoMA acquired its first photo-
graphs, the institution that was to become the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) was
founded in 1935. From its inception, SFMoMA
advocated strongly for photography’s place in
modern art as well as in the institution’s program-
ming. Without a doubt, this decision owed much to
the active group of San Francisco photographers,
the f/64 Group, whose members included Ansel
Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Wes-
ton. Advocating a sharp and unaffected style of
photography, the group coalesced at a major exhi-
bition of their work at the M. H. de Young Memor-
ial Museum, also in San Francisco. The work of
these photographers was among the first to enter
SFMoMA’s permanent collection, prompting reg-
ular exhibitions and an expanding collection, as
when Ansel Adams encouraged Georgia O’Keeffe,
Stieglitz’s widow, to donate dozens of his photo-
graphs to the museum in 1952.
In 1949, the International Museum of Photogra-
phy (as it is currently known) opened at the George
Eastman House in Rochester. George Eastman had
founded Eastman Kodak Company, which was
almost single-handedly responsible for the popular-
izing of photography at the end of the nineteenth
century. Their famous slogan, ‘‘You push the but-
ton, we do the rest,’’ lured many to begin making
photographs as a personal hobby or family chroni-
cle. Eastman himself had been an avid photogra-
pher in addition to collector. Fifteen years after his
death in 1932, the first museum in the United States
dedicated solely to photography and moving pic-
tures was chartered. Beaumont Newhall was ap-
pointed curator of the collections and, from 1958
to 1971, he served as the director of Eastman
House. Newhall’s exhibitions and friendships with
leading photographers of the day not only greatly
affected the Eastman House programs, but the
development and education of photography stu-
dents at the nearby Rochester Institute of Technol-
ogy. Under Newhall’s tenure, the museum’s
holdings expanded exponentially, creating one of
the greatest photography collections in the world.
After an extremely successful career in fashion and
portrait photography and while heading up U.S.
naval combat photography during World War II,
the ever-versatile Edward Steichen mounted two
highly patriotic exhibitions at MoMA.Road to Vic-
tory(1942) andPower in the Pacific(1945) were
unabashed explorations of American military might
that utilized photographs in strikingly new ways
through placement, size, and juxtaposition. It was
as if Steichen had taken the photo-essays from pic-
ture magazines established in the decade before in
the pages ofLifeand made them three-dimensional.
Using photographs to illustrate a particular narra-
tive, Steichen’s efforts provide two early examples of
an exhibition-driven blurring of boundaries between
the documentary and propagandistic uses of photo-
graphic images. Such story-telling exhibition prac-
tices not only propelled him into the director’s seat
of the MoMA Photography Department, but they
would reach a global zenith in his next major project.
In January 1955, Steichen inaugurated what, by
many accounts, still reigns today as the most widely
attended photography exhibition ever,The Family of
Man. Both the exhibition installation and the book
based on it relied on a series of juxtapositions of
photographs made around the world. It took Stei-
chen three years to sort through the 2 million photo-
graphs and eventually select some 503 images by 273
photographers, grouped according to theme. Re-
printed to unify tones, to heighten dramatic con-
trasts, and to resize according to visual impact
(from 57 inches to wall-sized), each photograph
was presented as a tightly cropped image, without
border or frame, mounted on board. Once harmo-
nized in this fashion, the photographs were arranged
on columns, hung from wires and rods, suspended in
the air, and mounted on panels. The work’s original
captioning or title—along with most other deference
toward the artist—was eliminated in favor of the
thematic for a particular section that was comple-
mented by quotations, proverbs, and tales from a
host of cultures.
Through sequential thematic groupings such as
Birth, Family, Work, Love, and Death,The Family
of Manintended to replicate a universal course of
human life as sequences of moments that were highly
photographic and photographable. Steichen’s uni-
versal aims also prompted an extended tour of the
exhibition in U.S. venues and, beginning in 1959,
worldwide venues from Moscow to Paris to Japan.
In total, more than 10 million visitors experienced a
version ofThe Family of Man. Marked by such a
strong humanist impulse, the exhibition managed to
pull at the heartstrings of a public caught between
the shadows of World War II and the Cold War,
while also inciting strong criticism, perhaps most
famously from the cultural critic and theorist
Roland Barthes. Yet whatever its faults as a tribute
to the photographers who took the photographs or
as an honest pictorial investigation of the experience
of life in various parts of the globe, it must be said
that Steichen succeeded in collapsing categories that
photo history and photography institutions—
MoMA included—had long struggled to establish.MUSEUMS: UNITED STATES