The greatest photography exhibition of all time

Spectator

5 days ago

I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am enjoying a peculiar sensation for which the English language has no precise word. It is the beautiful yet bittersweet silence induced by an encounter with undeniably great art. Something so profound, moving and true, it leaves you speechless, maybe even a little breathless.
I've experienced this feeling just a few times in my life. When I saw the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican Museums. When I read the last pages of Joyce's Ulysses – 'yes I said yes I will Yes'. When I listened to the second side of Joy Division's Closer, with its exquisitely mournful electro-chamber music. And now I am experiencing it again. Because I have just been to see what has regularly been referred to as 'the greatest photographic exhibition of all time'.
It is called The Family of Man. That's the apt and enduring title: utopian, hopeful, full of postwar idealism. Once upon a time, the exhibition was everywhere. First unveiled in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it toured the world, from the Soviet Union to Africa, Japan to Australia, and swiftly became the most-viewed photography show in history. It's thought that more than ten million people saw it in those early years.
Its genesis was simple enough. The head of photography at MoMA was a Luxembourger named Edward Steichen, a celebrated photographer in his own right. Along with a couple of assistants, Steichen resolved to track down the finest photographs of humanity in all its variety, and stitch them into one remarkable exhibition.
The small team contacted agencies, news bureaux, photographers and friends from every corner of the world. In the end they had two million images. The next job was to whittle them down. This happened in a cluttered office above a strip club in downtown Manhattan. It is said the strippers took pity on the overworked photo curators, and often invited them downstairs for free shows and spaghetti.
Eventually, the two million became 100,000. Then 10,000. Then 1,000. Finally, they got it down to 503. These became The Family of Man: 503 pictures of mankind, taken by hundreds of different photographers from 68 countries at the glittering peak of the photographic age, when magazines like Life sold in their millions and photographers were global stars.
Steichen arranged the photos thematically: births, weddings, kisses, soldiers, children, grief. The message was unspoken, yet clear and bold. This is humanity. We are the same. And for a few brief, glorious years, the exhibition soared. Diplomats supposedly wept. Unesco praised it to the skies. Even the Cold War, momentarily, thawed.
Then came the backlash.
The first loud note of disapproval was sounded by the French critic Roland Barthes. Writing in 1957, just two years after The Family of Man debuted, he accused it of peddling a dangerous myth. By grouping human experience into universal themes, Barthes argued, the exhibition stripped suffering of political context. Instead of utopian idealism, he saw a saccharine fantasy of unity, flattering to American liberalism and blind to structures of power.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Barthes's critique became a chorus. Photographers felt belittled by the thematic curation, with their names not appearing alongside their work. Feminists decried its masculine gaze. Susan Sontag was the harshest of all. The Family of Man was now accused of being 'colonial', 'paternalistic', 'sentimental', 'ideologically naive'. It was too American, too white, too unwilling to confront exploitation or empire.
And so the exhibition became deeply unfashionable. Worse, it became unfundable. It disappeared from cultural memory and from the approved curricula.
Except it didn't – not quite. Like an ageing and weary Odysseus, it came home.
Steichen had asked back in the 1960s that the exhibition be installed permanently in his native Luxembourg. Perhaps adding to the sense of The Family of Man being unloved and unwanted, it took decades for his wish to be fulfilled. The chosen town was Clervaux, which had been largely flattened in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1994, 21 years after Steichen's death aged 93, the show was finally rehung, in full, in the rooms and corridors of the restored Château de Clervaux.
It is still there. And this is where we meet a strange and wonderful alchemy. In this odd, dysfunctional setting, the exhibition is arguably more powerful than ever.
Most photography exhibitions march you through boxy oblongs. This one does not. The Château de Clervaux is a labyrinth and the black-and-white photos – they are all monochrome – spring up in every nook and recess: unframed, unprotected, intimate, somehow naked. Some even fall from the medieval ceilings. There are alcoves where wedding photographs laugh and surprise. Stone staircases lead you, quite suddenly, from a room of ring-a-rosing children into a bunker of death and war.
A vaulted chamber throbs with vivid images of joyous youth. Then you turn a whitewashed corner and you're confronted by Robert Capa's photograph of a Spanish Civil War soldier, mid-collapse. Another turn, and a newborn emerges shockingly from the womb. A late, serene room shows an elderly Dutch couple: silently alone yet together.
The names of the photographers are still barely visible. Some are giants: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt, Brassaï. Others remain anonymous. It hardly matters. The sequencing is all, and it is symphonic, Mozartian, perfect. These really are 503 of the greatest photos in history, arranged by a curator who knew exactly what he was doing.
As for the criticisms, they now seem childish or bitter. In an age when every art exhibition must come with hectoring labels and declamations – Look at all the inequality! Spot the symbols of slavery! – Steichen's show does not tell. A pianist riffs in a smoky dance hall. A mother fiercely kisses her child. A family stands in a kitchen: grubby and real, fragile and loving.
One of the primary accusations against The Family of Man was that it is simplistic. And perhaps it is. But so is human life. We all live and love and laugh and leave. All of us follow the same simple pattern. And that is what Steichen and his chosen photographers captured. That is what you can still see on the calm, whitewashed walls of the Château de Clervaux, Luxembourg.
This is the still, sad music of humanity turned into 503 immortal photos. And the entrance fee is six euros.