Door Wim le Mans en Gerard IJzer

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children.

The Family of Man 

Clervaux, Luxemburg 2025 - Het fotoboek The World’s family, photographs by Ken Heyman, verscheen in 1983 en was, bijna dertig jaar later, een vervolg op de beroemde tentoonstelling The Family of Man in het MoMa in 1955 van de fotograaf Edward Steichen. 

Steichen was toen directeur van de afdeling Fotografie van het Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichen had wereldwijd fotografen uitgenodigd om foto's in te sturen. Zijn doel was om ‘het hele spectrum van het leven, van geboorte tot dood’, vast te leggen – een project waarvoor hij de fotografie bij uitstek geschikt achtte. Zijn tentoonstelling had de vorm van foto-essays waarin universele aspecten van de menselijke ervaring en het menselijke leven belicht werden, toerde acht jaar lang de wereld rond en trok meer dan 9 miljoen bezoekers. Steichen’s boek verscheen in 1955 tijdens opening van The Family of Man.

Het verscheen in een luxe-editie en in goedkope paperback, waarvan er miljoenen verkocht werden. Honderden foto’s van fotografen van over de hele wereld werden geëxposeerd. De tentoonstelling was een oproep voor wereldwijde solidariteit in het decennium na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Wordt het – na 80 jaar – geen tijd voor een update van dit project?

In Clervaux, luxembourg is de tentoonstelling nog te zien.

Nog steeds is welzijn en welvaart in de wereld ongelijk verdeeld. Nog steeds zijn mensen die geen leven hebben: hongersnoden, vergeten oorlogen, landjepik. Gaza, Soudan, Oekraïne. Niet alles wordt vergeten, niet altijd wordt er weggekeken. De vinger wordt op de pijnlijke plek gelegd. Zijn goede voorbeeld is er: Yawm al-Firak, Arabisch voor Dag van het Afscheid, is de solotentoonstelling in het Foam van de Palestijns-Nederlandse fotograaf Sakir Khader. Sinds 2024 is hij aangesloten bij het gerenommeerde fotografencollectief Magnum Photos. Zijn beelden verkennen de fragiele grens tussen leven en dood.  

Verklaringen en doelstellingen

Edward Steichen stelde de volgende verklaring en doelstelling voor zijn toenmalige tentoonstelling op: 

New York 1955 – “The Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to consider the recognition and advancement of the art of photography an important part of its program.”

“The inclusion of The Family of Man project as one of the major international exhibitions celebrating the Museum’s 25th anniversary, gives further emphasis and scope to this recognition of photography as an art.”

“The Family of Man is planned as an exhibition of photography portraying the universal elements and emotions and the oneness of human beings throughout the world. It is probably the most ambitious and challenging project photography has ever faced and one for which, I believe, the art of photography is uniquely qualified.”

“This exhibition will require photographs, made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death with emphasis on the everyday relationships of man to himself, to his family, to the community and to the world we live in: subject matter ranging from babies to philosophers, from the kindergarten to the university, from the child’s home-made toys to scientific research, from tribal counoils of primitive peoples to the councils of the United Nations. It will require photographs of lovers and marriage and child bearing of the family unit with its joys, trials and tribulations, its deep rooted “devotions and its antagonisms, photographs that reveal the selflessness of mother love, not simply the Madonna element in ‘mother’ but her all embracing love, with the sense of security she gives to her ohildren and to the home she creates in all its warmth and magnificence, its heartaches and exaltations.”

“We are not concerned with photographs that border on propaganda for or against any political ideologies.”

“We are concerned with following the individual and the family unit from its reactions to the beginnings of life and continuing on through death and burial.”

“We are concerned with man in relation to his environment, to the beauty and richness of the earth he has inherited and what he has done with this inheritance, the good and the great things, the destructive and the stupid things.”

“We are concerned with children, as the universality of man is not only accepted but taken for granted among children.”

“We are concerned with the religious rather than religions.”

“We are concerned with basic human consciousness more than social consciousness.”

“We are concerned with photographs which express the universal through the individual and the particular, that demonstrate the importance of the art of photography in explaining man to man across the world, his dreams and aspirations, mirroring the flaming creative foroes of love and truth and the corrosive evil inherent in the lie.”

“I believe that love should be the dominant and key element in The Family of Man exhibition, just as it is in the individual family.”

“Photographers, professional and amateur, in all parts of the world are invited to submit for the Museum’s consideration prints they believe are appropriate to the project. It is essential to keep in mind the universal elements and aspects of human relations and the experiences common to all mankind rather than situations that represent conditions exclusively related or peculiar to a race, an event, a time or a place.”

“Details of the exhibition cannot be planned until all available photographs from different parts of the world have been collected, as the scope of the exhibition will depend largely on how penetrating and revealing the qualities presented by the photographs are, and how inoisively they meet the challenge of the theme.”

“If the assembled photographs bring the elements of this theme together, they will demonstrate that the art of photography is a dynamic process for giving form to ideas. This exhibition will then be created in a passionate spirit of devoted love and faith in man. Nothing short of that will do.”

The Family of Man

Prologue by: Carl Sandburg

The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Lamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, “I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the Family.”

Many the babies and grownups here from photographs made in sixty-eight nations round our planet Earth. You travel and see what the camera saw. The wonder of human mind, heart, wit and instinct, is here. You might catch yourself saying, “I’m not a stranger here.”

People! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers.

Here are ironworkers, bridgemen, musicians, sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords and the landless, the loved and the unloved, the lonely and abandoned, the brutal and the compassionate-one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.

Here or there you may witness a startling harmony where you say, “This will be haunting me a long time with a loveliness I hope to understand better.* In a seething of saints and sinners, winners or losers, in a womb of super-stition, faith, genius, crime, sacrifice, here is the People, the one and only source of armies, navies, work-gangs, the living flowing breath of the history of nations, ever lighted by the reality or illusion of hope. Hope is a sustaining human gift.

Everywhere is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation keeping the Family of Man alive and continuing. Everywhere the sun, moon and stars, the climates and weathers, have meanings for people.

Though meanings vary, we are alike in all countries and tribes in trying to read what sky, land and sea say to us. Alike and ever alike we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity lives with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.

Hands here, hands gnarled as thorntree roots and others soft as faded rose leaves. Hands reaching, praying and groping, hands holding tools, torches, brooms, fishnets, hands doubled in fists of flaring anger, hands moving in caress of beloved faces. The hands and feet of children playing ring-around-a-rosy-countries and languages different but the little ones alike in playing the same game.

Here are set forth babies arriving, suckling, growing into youths restless and questioning. Then as grownups they seek and hope. They mate, toil, fish, quarrel, sing, fight, pray, on all parallels and meridians having likeness. The earliest man, ages ago. had tools, weapons, cattle. as seen in his cave drawings.

And like him the latest man of our day has his tools, weapons, cattle. The earliest man struggled through inexpressibly dark chaos of hunger, fear, violence, sex.

A long journey it has been from that early Family of Man to the one of today which has become a still more prodigious spectacle.

If the human face is “the masterpiece of God” it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak what words can never say. Some tell of eternity and others only the latest tattlings. Child faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wind. Faces having land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering where to go this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in an instant of agony, mouths in a dumbshow mockery lacking speech, faces of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm and ready-for-death faces. Some of them are worth a long look now and deep contemplation later. Faces betokening a serene blue sky or faces dark with storm winds and lashing night rain. And faces beyond forgetting, written over with faiths in men and dreams of man surpassing himself. An alphabet here and a multiplication table of living breathing human faces.

In the times to come as the past there will be generations taking hold as though loneliness and the genius of struggle has always dwelt in the hearts of pioneers. To the question, “What will the story be of the Family of Man across the near or far future?” some would reply, “For the answers read if you can the strange and baffling eyes of youth.”

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.

There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women.

There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children.

A camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven of fun, mystery and holiness-here is the Family of Man!

Family of Man

Editor: Jerry Mason

Art Director: Leo Lionni

Art Assistant: Frances Gruse

Captions: Dorothy Norman

Production: Allied Graphic Arts, Inc.

Printing: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company

Assistant to Edward Steichen: Wayne Miller

Theme photograph of Piper by Eugene Harris, “Popular Photography” Inside front cover by Lick Observatory Inside back cover by Cedric Wright

Published for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by the Maco Magazine Corporation,

480 Lexington Avenue, New York 17, N. Y.