The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in ... - Public Culture

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ican policies, and developed an armed services program to support soldiers in the
field and veterans at home.
Of all the work they undertook, museum officials were perhaps proudest of a
single exhibition, the 1942 propaganda blockbuster Road to Victory. The exhibition
“was not only a masterpiece of photographic art but one of the most moving
and inspiring exhibitions ever held in the museum,” they recalled at a meeting
three years later. 21 It was also the place at which Steichen first mastered the aesthetic
strategies that he would later employ in The Family of Man. In the fall of
1941, at the request of museum trustee David McAlpin, Steichen began trolling
through thousands of photographs, almost all from government collections. Of the
150 images that Steichen eventually chose, more than 130 came from the FSA. 22
The rest came from the army and navy, various press agencies, and several other
government bureaus. Like Steichen’s own work at the time, the images tended
to be “straight” photography — that is, they depicted their subjects mostly in a
head- on, straightforward manner, with clear, sharp lines and a strong documentary
flavor. Steichen also recruited Sandburg to create a text for the show. Finally,
in what turned out to be an inspired decision, the Museum of Modern Art’s director
of exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler, paired these two middlebrow American realists
with a representative of the European avant- garde, Bauhaus refugee designer
Herbert Bayer.
Before emigrating to the United States in 1938, Bayer had labored in the
German Bauhaus as a student and then an instructor of design. He became best
known for his work in typography, including his development of the all- lowercase
typeface used in many Bauhaus publications. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928,
Bayer also worked as an exhibition designer. In 1930 he and former Bauhaus colleagues
Walter Gropius and László Moholy- Nagy designed the German contribution
to the Exposition de la Société des artistes décorateurs at the Grand Palais in
Paris. 23 Bayer was responsible for a display of mass- produced everyday objects.
Conventional exhibition practice of the time suggested that Bayer should arrange
his objects and images either at eye level or as they might be seen in an actual
21. “The Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees and Members of the
Corporation of the Museum of Modern Art Held on Thursday, November 15, 1945,” in Bulletin of the
Museum of Modern Art, February 1946, 5.
22. Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America,
1890 – 1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 135.
23. Paul Overy, “Visions of the Future and the Immediate Past: The Werkbund Exhibition, Paris
1930,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 4 (2004): 337 – 57; Staniszewski, Power of Display, 25 – 27.
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