In the years since
The Family of Man, several projects, exhibitions and publications were directly inspired by Steichen's.
Westerbeck argues that although Steichen did not originate its 'mythic appeal', anthropology as a major genre of photography, and its subject, the whole human race as a united 'world family', became a public expectation and was a precursor to Marshall McLuhan's '
global village'. The exhibition met with rejection by the press and functionaries in the photographic profession in Germany and Switzerland, and was described by Fritz Kempe, photographer, photo historian and board member of a prominent photo company, as "tasty fodder to stimulate the aggressive instincts of semi—intellectual young men.". The cover design based on Steichen's original and featured a Black Star agency picture of a woman in Greece with flowers in her hair. Project director was
Julia Scully, and the art director, Albert Squillace. A contemporary review of the book in
Spokeswoman of December 1979 described it as an "an ambitious attempt to portray the ephemeral and the timeless qualities inherent in woman [...] Feelings of love, sisterhood, kindness, rage, hate, grief and delight are captured here in portraits of women of all ages and origins." The pictures were accompanied by quotations from writings of
Emily Dickinson,
Denise Levertov,
Marianne Moore,
Christina Stead,
Diane Wakowski and others chosen by project editor Sylvia Cole. Material from both
The Family of Man and
The Family of Woman were later featured at the Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum in
Basel to represent the career path of a female professional from "the search for recognition to self-affirmation" in the 1989
Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit ('Swiss Exhibition for Women's Labour'), a project by three women architects,
Inès Lamunière,
Flora Ruchat-Roncati, and
Beate Schnitte, commemorating expositions of Swiss women’s work of 1928 and 1958.
The World's Family (1983) ''The World's Family
was another Jerry Mason publication through the Putnam Group, and also with designer Albert Squillace and editor Sylvia Cole. Its contents were photographs solely by American Ken Heyman, too young, as Mason points out in his introduction, to have submitted images for The Famiy of Man.'' Mason cites Heyman's work of and for
Margaret Mead as his credentials for a new "vision of humanity," thirty years after
The Family of Man, and of a different world "in 1983 when one begins to feel the
Orwellian predictions for 1984 multiplying themselves beyond imagination? Some communities of families sense themselves hurtling into obliteration and oblivion."
The Family of Man 1955–1984 (1984) Independent curator
Marvin Heiferman's
The Family of Man 1955·1984 was a floor to ceiling collage of over 850 images and texts from magazines, newspapers and the art world shown in 1984 at PSI, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources Inc. (now
MoMA PS1) Long Island City N.Y.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau described it as a reexamination of the themes of the 1955 show and critique of Steichen's arrangement of them into a "spectacle"; ...a grab bag of imagery and publicity ranging from baby food and sanitary napkin boxes to hard-core pornography, from detergent boxes to fashion photography, a cornucopia of consumer culture much of which, in one way or another, could be seen to engage the same themes purveyed in
The Family of Man. In a certain sense, Heifferman's [sic] riposte to Steichen's show made the useful connection between the spectacle of the exhibition and the spectacle of the commodity, suggesting that both must be understood within the framing context of late capitalism.
Oppositions: We are the world, you are the third world (1990) In 1990 the second
Rotterdam Biennale lead exhibition was
Oppositions: We are the world, you are the third world - Commitment and cultural identity in contemporary photography from Japan, Canada, Brazil, the Soviet Union and the Netherlands. The cover of the catalogue imitates the layout and colour of the original but replaces the famous image of the little flute player by Eugene Harris with six images, four photographs of young women from different cultural backgrounds and two excerpts from paintings. In the exhibit scenes of an endangered ecology and the threat to cultural identity in the
global village predominate, but there are intimations that nature and love may prevail, despite everything artificial that surrounds it, notably so in family life.
New Relations. The Family of Man Revisited (1992) In 1992 the American photographer and critic
Larry Fink published a collection of photographs under the heading of
New Relations. The Family of Man Revisited in the Photography Center Quarterly. His approach updated Steichen's vision by integrating aspects of human existence which Steichen had omitted both because of his wish for coherence and of his innermost convictions. Fink provides only the following commentary: "Rather than a fawn pretence to anthropological/sociologic analysis of the events depicted; rather than categorise and choose democratically for social relevance. I took the path of least resistance and most reward. I simply selected quality images with the belief that the path of strong visual energies would visit equal strong social presences". He concludes: The show is a compendium of visual hints. It is not an answer or even a full question, but cognitive clues....
family, nation, tribe, community: SHIFT (1996) In September/October 1996 the NGBK (
Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende kunst Berlin - New Society for the Visual Arts Berlin) in the context of
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures Berlin) conceived and organised the project
family, nation, tribe, community: SHIFT with direct reference to the historical MoMA exhibition. In the catalogue, five authors;
Ezra Stoller,
Max Kozloff, Torsten Neuendorff, Bettina Allamoda and
Jean Back analyse and comment on the historical model and twenty-two artists offer individual approaches around the following themes: Universalism/Separatism, Family/Anti-family, Individualisation, Common Strategies, Differences. The works are predominantly from artist photographers rather than photojournalists; Bettina Allamoda,
Aziz + Cucher,
Los Carpinteros,
Alfredo Jaar,
Mike Kelley,
Edward and
Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Lovett/Codagnone, Loring McAlpin,
Christian Philipp Müller, Anna Petrie,
Martha Rosler, Lisa Schmitz,
Elaine Sturtevant,
Mitra Tabizian and Andy Golding,
Wolfgang Tillmans, Danny Tisdale, Lincoln Tobler, and
David Wojnarowicz reflect major contemporary issues: identity, the information crisis, the illusion of leisure, and ethics. In his introduction to the exhibition, Frank Wagner writes that Steichen had offered a vision of an harmonious, neat and highly structured world which, in reality, was complex, often unintelligible and even contradictory, but by contrast, this Berlin exhibition highlights 'first' and 'third' world tensions and is eager to concentrate on a variety of attitudes.
The 90s: A Family of Man? (1997) The following year Enrico Lunghi directed the exhibition
The 90s: A Family of Man?: images of mankind in contemporary art, held 2 October–30 November 1997 in Luxembourg, Steichen's birthplace and by then the repository of the archive of a full version of his
The Family of Man. Aside from their understanding of Steichen's efforts to present commonalities amongst the human race, curators Paul di Felice and Pierre Stiwer interpret Steichen's show as an effort to make content of Museum of Modern Art accessible to the public in an era when it was regarded as the elitist supporter of 'incomprehensible' abstract art. They point to their predecessor's success in having his show embraced by a record audience and emphasise that dissenting voices of criticism were heard only amongst 'intellectuals'. However, Steichen's success, they caution, was to manipulate the message of his selected imagery; "After all," they write, "wasn't he the artistic director of
Vogue and
Vanity Fair ... ?". They proclaim their desire to retain the exhibiting artists' 'autonomy' while not posing their work as the antithesis of Steichen's concept, but to respect, and echo, its arrangement while "raising questions" as indicated by the question mark in their quotation of the original title. The exhibition and catalogue 'quote' from Steichen, setting pages of the book of his exhibition with their quotations around groupings of images (in monochrome) beside the works of contemporary artists (predominantly in colour) collected in themes used in the original, though the correlation fails for some contemporary ideas, which digital imaging, installation and montage works effectively convey. The thirty-five artists include
Christian Boltanski,
Nan Goldin,
Inez van Lamsweerde,
Orlan and
Wolfgang Tillmans.
The Family of Man 2 (2005) From 1999 to 2005, Leica Users Group members: Alastair Firkin, Satoshi Oka, Tim Spragens, Tom Smart and Stanislaw Stawowy organized
The Family of Man 2 project to celebrate new millennium, 50 years of the
Leica M system, and the Edward Steichen project anniversary. As with Steichen's project, the thousands of photos received were edited to 500, 100 annually during the project. It was exhibited online and an album with winning photos was privately published.
Reconsidering The Family of Man (2012) The
Photographic Society of America (PSA) drew on their archives to stage
Reconsidering The Family of Man during April and May 2012. Not hung and mounted as an installation, Artspace at Untitled executive director Jon Burris' linear display was based on the concept of Steichen's original exhibit but concentrated on his sub-theme of the passage from birth to death. From the close to 5,000 photographs in the PSA collection, a selection of 50 original prints was made for their show. One work in common with the original exhibition was
Ansel Adams'
Mount Williamson from Manzanar which in
The Family of Man was presented at
mural scale, while the PSA used a vintage, 11" x 14" Adams print from their collection, displaying it while a first edition copy of
The Family of Man publication opened to a double-page spread of Adams photograph.
The Family of the Invisibles (2016) As part of the 2015–2016 France-Korea year, curators of the (Cnap) and the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain of Aquitaine (Frac Aquitaine), Pascal Beausse (Cnap), Claire Jacquet (Frac Aquitaine), and Magali Nachtergael, Assistant Professor at the
Sorbonne, collaborated to produce the exhibition
The Family of the Invisibles at the
Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and the Ilwoo Space in Seoul, from 5 April to 29 May 2016. The show was devoted to invisible and minority figures, their demands for identity, and the possibility of reconfiguring a politics of representation to the ideal of giving a place to each member of the human community as represented in more than 200 emblematic photographs. The works from the 1930s to 2016, drawn from the Cnap and Frac Aquitaine collections were selected on the principle of Roland Barthes' deconstruction identified by the curators in his
Mythologies and in
Camera Lucida, the latter being treated as a visual manifesto for minorities. The exhibition was presented in the Seoul Museum of Art in four sections, culminating in provocative contemporary photography including the 2009 series of deceased migrants wrapped in cloth in
Les Proscrits ('The Outcasts') by Mathieu Pernot, and
Sophie Calle's 1986
Les Aveugles in which she photographed those things that her blind subjects described as the most beautiful. The "Prologue" of the exhibition at the Ilwoo Space, provided a critical and historical counterpoint. Texts by Pascal Beausse, Jacqueline Guittard, Claire Jacquet and Magali Nachtergael, Suejin Shin (Ilwoo Foundation) and Kyung-hwan Yeo (SeMA) were presented in a catalogue.
The Family Of No Man: Re-visioning the world through non-male eyes (2018) The Family Of No Man: Re-visioning the world through non-male eyes, held July 2–8, 2018, in Arles brought together responses to an open call by Cosmos Arles Books, a satellite space of the Rencontres d'Arles, by 494 female and inter-gender artists from all around the world, in a revisitation of Edward Steichen's original. Works were displayed in interactive installations outdoors and indoors, and uploaded to an online platform as they were received.
Permanent installation, Chateau Clervaux, Luxembourg The permanent installation of the exhibition today at
Chateau Clervaux in Luxembourg follows the layout of the inaugural exhibition at MoMA in order to recreate the original viewing experience, though of necessity, it is adapted to the unique space of two floors of the restored Castle. Since the 2013 restoration it has incorporated a library (that includes some of the catalogues of the sequel exhibitions above) and contextualises
The Family of Man with historical material and interpretation. ==Cultural references to
The Family of Man==