Author : Gerd Hurm
Release : 2020-08-09
Genre : Art
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Book Rating : 69X/5 ( reviews)

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The Family of Man Revisited - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Family of Man Revisited write by Gerd Hurm. This book was released on 2020-08-09. The Family of Man Revisited available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Family of Man is the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography. The book of the exhibition, still in print, is also the most commercially successful photobook ever published. First shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, the exhibition travelled throughout the United States and to forty-six countries, and was seen by over nine million people. Edward Steichen conceived, curated and designed the exhibition. He explained its subject as `the everydayness of life' and `the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world'. The exhibition was a statement against war and the conflicts and divisions that threatened a common future for humanity after 1945. The popular international response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Many critics, however, have dismissed the exhibition as a form of sentimental humanism unable to address the challenges of history, politics and cultural difference.This book revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthes's influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichen's work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, letters from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it seems timely to revisit The Family of Man.