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

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offered a viewer a potential moment of identification. At another, however, the
pictures acted as an ensemble, an array of images that visitors needed to rearrange
within their own psyches. In the process of aggregating and organizing these
images, visitors could, at least in theory, engage in a degree of self- formation
not open to citizens of authoritarian regimes. Most important, they could emerge
from this process as psychologically whole and self- directing. Unlike the citizens
of Nazi Germany or of the Soviet Union, China, or North Korea whom so many
Americans imagined, visitors to The Family of Man would not suffer from psychological
fragmentation or interpersonal atomization. As a result, they would not
be victimized by despots.
Nor would they run wild, however. Even as Steichen, Miller, and Rudolph
offered viewers the chance to do the democratic psychological work of choosing
others with whom to identify, they constrained their visitors’ choices. The Family
of Man thus modeled a more diverse and tolerant society, but also a society whose
members had adjusted themselves to an array of opportunities chosen on their
behalf by those in power. In comparison to fascist alternatives, the world brought
to life at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 must have looked enormously individualistic,
varied, and free. But even as it challenged the hierarchies of totalitarianism,
the exhibition modeled the emergence of a society whose citizens were to
manage themselves in terms set by the systems within which they lived — and by
the experts who developed those systems.
This systems- oriented society is one that many Americans inhabit now. By
seeing how it came to life within The Family of Man, we have a chance to relearn
how we came to this place in time. Since the early 1970s, critics have focused
on The Family of Man as an exercise in symbolic domination by an emerging
superpower and on the 1950s as the quintessential epoch of the quisling citizen,
the cowed white- collar man, the browbeaten housewife. Only the generation of
the 1960s, these critics imply, found the courage to saw through the bars of their
parents’ prisons and set everyone free. But this is a myth. To revisit The Family
of Man is to glimpse a holistic, individualistic, utopian vision that would animate
the countercultural outbursts to come. At the same time, it is to remember that
the midcentury effort to celebrate individual difference and to make it the basis
of national unity also helped pioneer postmodern modes of mediated authority.
In that sense, revisiting The Family of Man provides more than a new view of
American culture in the early Cold War. It also offers us a glimpse of the political
and historical contradictions behind the image- world that we inhabit today.
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