503 images by 273 photographers from 68 countries
selected out of over 2 million photographs submitted
from all over the world. The title was taken from a
poem by Carl Sandburg who wrote in his introduc-
tion that ‘‘Everywhere is love and love-making, wed-
dings and babies from generation to generation
keeping the Family of Man alive and continuing...
alike and ever alike we are....’’ Steichen wanted to
explore photography’s universal themes such as love,
childhood, family, work, play, suffering, and death.
He aimed to convey the dynamism of photography
and how it could help explain ‘‘man to man’’ and act
as ‘‘a mirror of the universal elements and emotions
in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essen-
tial oneness of mankind throughout the world.’’
The exhibition was seen as an international and
communal effort to heal the wounds still left over
from WWII and it toured Europe (including Rus-
sia), Africa, and Asia. It was an attempt to dissemi-
nate the ideas of these commonalities and included
photographs from the Farm Security Administra-
tion, the National Archives, and files fromLife
Magazine. Images included scenes from middle
America, the Indian subcontinent, Java, Europe,
Cuba, Pakistan, and the Belgian Congo. Well-
known names such as Bill Brandt, Robert Capa,
Robert Doisneau, Ruth Orkin, Irving Penn, Dor-
othea Lange, and Allan and Diane Arbus graced
the pages of the exhibition catalogue, which is
sprinkled with philosophical quotes from such
diverse personalities as Montaigne, Thomas Jeffer-
son, and a Sioux Native American.
The Family of Manexhibition said many things
about mid-century photography but one of the
most interesting was the discourse it prompted
regarding the shift in the treatment of the African
American as a subject from before and after WWII.
The exhibition included images of African Ameri-
cans by photographers such as Consuelo Kanaga,
Helen Levitt, W. Eugene Smith, and Wayne Miller,
in whose work we see portraits of intimacy between
family members, children playing in the streets, and
the American jazz scene.
One of these is often defined as one of the least-
known American photographers, though Consuelo
Kanaga’s (1894–1978) career spanned 50 years and
she is now credited with having pushed the subject
of the African American towards a less romanti-
cized and more realistic viewpoint. A photographer
during the Depression, by the 1940s, Kanaga
focused her camera on the power of the individual
subject most likely inspired by the photographs of
the Appalachian residents made in the 1920s, and
1930s by Doris Ulmann. Equally indebted to the
Photo-Secessionists (Stieglitz and Steichen) Kana-
ga’s work blended commercial photography and
social documentary with a hint of abstraction. Her
balance between aesthetics and social issues
explores this interaction between the camera and
the subject that was such a central theme in the
postwar era. Perhaps Kanaga’s most significant
contribution to postwar photography developed
from her trips to Tennessee and Florida in the late
1940s and early 1950s. In the marshlands of Florida
she took her most memorable image of an African
American migrant worker protecting her two small
children with her arms. The photograph ‘‘She is a
Tree of Life to Them’’ was so named by Edward
Steichen when he placed it inThe Family of Man
exhibition in 1955. Kanaga said that this striking
image was influenced by Sargent Johnson, an Afri-
can American sculptor from San Francisco.
Another group of photographers who rose to
prominence after WWII were African-Americans,
who played a significant role in the way that the
world viewed them as both subject and artist in the
postwar years. Along with other great names such
as Richard Saunders and Gordon Parks, Roy De-
Carava is now remembered as one of the most
influential photographers of the mid-century
whose collection of work spans three decades and
gives us some of our most memorable images of
DeCarava’s native Harlem. In a time when the art
world was dominated by the White male, African-
Americans were kept on the sidelines and had
worked largely in journalism and commercial
photography, the most well-known being James
VanDerZee who was a studio and portrait photo-
grapher. Yet things rapidly changed after 1950 and
this was partly due to DeCarava.
DeCarava began his career as a painter who
worked early on as a commercial artist. In 1947,
having exhausted the medium, he turned to photo-
graphy as a mode of expression. He liked the direct-
ness of the camera. With help from Edward
Steichen, DeCarava became the ninth photographer
ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in
1955 co-authored his famous bookThe Sweet Fly-
paper of Lifewith poet Langston Hughes. The book
won much critical acclaim and marked a turning
point in African-American photography as an art
form. With DeCarava we find sensitive portrayals of
life in Harlem with images that are often mere sha-
dows of form. His photos reflected the move away
from the harsh political motifs of the 1930s and a
general postwar shift towards a more personal,
more abstract view of things. Perhaps his most nota-
ble contribution to African-American photography
is DeCarava’s representation of the Black commu-
nity, and of greats such as singer Billie Holiday andHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: POSTWAR ERA