PH I LOSOPHY AN D PRACTICE

The "Common Man" and the End of Media Utopia

In his much cited 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," critic Walter Benjamin argued that the proliferation of photomechanical means of production marked one of history's watershed moments. For the masses, he forecast that reproducibility would be truly revolutionary. In the end, it would "pry an object from its shell ... [and] destroy its aura."47 Thus removed from "the fabric of tradition," photographically reproduced and widely distributed pictures of once class-bound objects would become strategic elements in fomenting social change among the masses, who could witness at first hand the decline of privilege in their new access to art reproduction. Benjamin's hopes for the mass media were echoed throughout European experimental photography, especially in Germany.

As historian Maud Lavin summed up, "the burning issue for the German avant-garde from 1922 until Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 was not at all a rebellion against art institutions, but rather a serious and prolonged engagement with mass culture."48 Similarly, American documentary photographers thought their images were self-validating, needing only wide exposure in the press to change the hearts and minds of the people.

Benjamin was wrong about the special aura that unique objects have. Far from destroying the aura, art reproductions served to increase it. Photographs of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa roused people to want to see the original. Oddly, photographic reproducibility sometimes destroyed the aura of the original photograph. For example, the many thousands of people who cut out and saved press pictures of Dorothea Lange' s Migrant Mother felt that they owned the original, because it was the very one that affected them.

Written from a left-wing perspective, Benjamin's essay is

typical of international writing in the 1930S in its concern for what was alternately called "the people," "the masses," "ordinary humanity," and "the common man." Notions of progressive social change aimed at the common man sustained photographs in such divergent styles as those done by the Russian experimental photographers and those published by the F.S.A. The immense brutality and destruction of World War II, and the advent of the atomic bomb, eroded faith in the future of the human race. At the same time, the dissolution of experimental photography into commercially viable styles, and the control of visual media by large corporations and news agencies, dampened belief in the inherently revolutionary nature of camerawork.

One mark of the waning faith in photography, which became widespread after World War II and continues today, is the repeated inquiry into the authenticity of the documentary photographs that emerged as icons of the war experience, such as Robert Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier (see Fig. 9.34) and Joe Rosenthal's Mannes Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (see Fig. 9.37) In the postwar phase of the age of mechanical reproduction, iconic images have often been greeted with suspicion. Almost a century earlier, Alexander Gardner could openly describe his staging of Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (see Fig. 4.18). By contrast, war photographers such as Capa and Rosenthal were unable to deflect doubts that anyone can be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time to make such powerful and well-composed symbols. The war years had seen photography exploited to an unprecedented extent by government and the military on both sides to control public opinion. Prized for its contribution to uniting nations during the war, photography was far less certain of its role in the postwar world.

PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE: THE "COMMON MAN" AND THE END OF MEDIA UTOPIA I 309

W H~LE POSTWA~ EUROPE A.NO ASIA sta~gered under~e lo~s of millions of people, coupled WIth economIC devastation, the Umted States, whICh dId not suffer physical damage on its mainland, emerged as the world's leading industrial and military power. By

1947, the relief and unity felt by the Allies after their victory in World War II had given way to a world polarized by what the American presidential advisor Bernard Baruch called the

Cold War. Beginning in 1945, the Soviet Union established its influence among eastern European nations in the territories previously occupied by Nazi Germany. In addition, the

Soviets administered eastern Germany, one of the four zones into which Germany was partitioned at the end of the war.

When the Soviet Union and the eastern European nations in its sphere of influence

refused rebuilding funds under the Marshall Plan, initiated by U:S. secretary of state George

C. Marshall, suspicion of Soviet long-term expansionist intentions rapidly spread in the

> West. Fired by the fear that its wartime ally wanted to spread communism throughout the world, and that the human misery of the immediate postwar period would make such

a message attractive, the United States redoubled its economic aid to Europe and some Middle Eastern countries.

World War II erased any lingering doubt that global forces affected all nations and regions. The word "globalization," showed up in dictionaries and ordinary parlance during

the 196os. Like other media of expression, photographic practice was caught up in the cross­

currents of postwar upheavals and crises. The "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum

of Modern Art in New York expressed a unity among the world's people that went

beyond political differences, and it phrased nuclear war as the greatest threat to global

understanding. In the United States, images from the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy

and Martin Luther King quickly became part of the nation's collective visual memory.

Filmmakers and photographers not only recorded, but were part of, the 1968 uprising in France and the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia. The medium aided the

beginnings of what would eventually be called identity politics, when photographers chose

as topics cultural distinctiveness and idiosyncratic behavior. Similarly, postwar anxieties about spiritual life in an age of material abundance were captured by the lens. In the United

States, the Civil Rights movement and reactions to the war in Vietnam were photographed,

and the resulting images were shown not only in newspapers and magazines, but on television, which quickly became the medium through which average people learned the

news. At the same time, photography was adopted by artists who cared less about the medium's historical attempts to join the fine arts and more about its potential to create

images whose objectivity accorded with Conceptualism. The distinction between art

photographers and artists who use photography continued throughout the twentieth

century, as notions of multimedia expressions gained currency.

I 3II

CHAPTER TEN

The Human Family

Hope and melancholy struggled in post-World War II expression. In photography, hope found its manifestation in "lbe Family of Man" exhibit, which began at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and traveled abroad. The show emphasized the similar experiences and aspirations that humans share. Nevertheless, "The Family of Man" was not a naive accolade. It placed hope in the context of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Despite the "Family of Man'''s call for unity and peace, people around the world came to resent the extensive military, financial, and cultural influence of the United States. Central and South American photographers convened in an effort to create distinctive regional art and documentary photographs. In Africa, South Africans used the medium both to record the evils of racial segregation and to underscore the aspects of social life and cultural expression that survived and even flourished under pressure. In India, photojournalism made extensive contributions to the independence movement. In Japan, representation of contemporary culture took into account the lasting effects of the atomic bombings. Division, opposition, and estrangement quickly dispelled the postwar peace.

THE FAMILY OF MAN

In 1947, John G. Morris, picture editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, decided to expand on the magazine'S series, "How America Lives." Influenced by the Farm Security Administration project, he decided to craft a more global version, which he called, "People are People the World Over." It would be a series of monthly photo-essays showing common activities in rural families around the globe,

10.1

CLAUDIA ANDUJAR, Yanomami Youth During a Traditional Reahu Festival, 1978.

such as laundering clothes, shopping, and cooking.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom Morris had met in Europe just before the liberation, contacted him and told him that he would be an ideal first customer for a new cooperative photographic agency that he founded with three other war-weary photographers, Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, and George Rodger (1908-1995).2lbus, Magnum Photos, established in the penthouse restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1947, by photographers hoping to gain more editorial control over their pictures, began supplying images to the quintessential American women's magazine of the twentieth century.

The World War II experiences of Magnum's founders oriented them toward a photography that would contribute to human betterment. lbeir aspiration was shared by the organizers of the large 1955 exhibition titled "The Family of Man" , mounted at New York's Museum of Modern Art. lbe show proposed photography as a means through which the alarming tensions and uncertainties of the Cold War era could be seen in a wider context of human values, emphasizing the theme of common humanity against the destructive effects of political polarization and other forms of divisiveness. lbe exhibit reaffirmed a faith in humanity for an audience shaken by gruesome images in Life magazine of Japanese atomic injuries and troubled by the new specter of global nuclear war. It pleased the general public more than any previous photographic exhibition, and the book derived from it became the best-selling photographic book of all time.

Edward Steichen, who returned from his wartime duties to head the museum's photography department, selected and organized the images according to universal themes, such as birth, work, and love. To generate the impression of global unison, Steichen homogenized the look of the individual photographs; cropped and shorn of their original titles, the

I 3I 3

exhibition prints were processed in a commercial lab, where their tonal values were harmonized. The prints were also transformed into poster-size images.

Steichen hoped that "The Family of Man" would illustrate "the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world." Aiming to highlight "human consciousness rather than social consciousness," he discarded images that demonstrated strong political and cultural differences.3 The unity of humankind was stressed even during the planning stages of the show, and the Museum of Modern Art announced that it would open simultaneously in New York, Europe, Asia, and Latin America-a proposal that was never realized.4

Steichen's utopian aspiration, in which supposed enemies and outcasts are revealed to share a common humanity, and national boundaries are ignored, should be seen against the background of hysterical anti-communism in early 195os' America and the equally shrill optimism of postwar consumer culture. The United Nations, founded in 1945, and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed in 1948, had offered a vision of the good society rising from the ashes of battle; Steichen's show underlined both the nobility and fragility of this vision.

To choose from among the 2.5 million photographs submitted, Steichen looked for "swiftness of seeing," the visual summing up of an idea in a single moment that formed the kernel of Modernist photographic practice familiar to audiences from nearly three decades of illustrated magazines and newspapers.s In the end, he selected about five hundred images from sixty-eight countries. As Jacob Deschin, camera editor ofthe New York Times, observed, "The Family of Man" was an "editorial achievement rather than an exhibition of photographs."6 Steichen clustered untitled photographs around concise sayings drawn from cultures around the world. For motherhood, he chose the biblical quotation, "She is a tree oflife to them" (Proverbs 3: 18); images oflaborers carried a quotation from the ancient Hindu religious poem, the Bhagavad-Gita: "If I did not work, these worlds would perish .... "

Overall, his installation design owed its dynamic programming of ideas and emotions to the exhibition spaces created by Russian and German artists between the world wars (see pp. 238-49), but critics generally did not acknowledge these European precedents. Indeed, photographer Barbara Morgan (1900-1992) thought that the show was so original that it needed a new term, perhaps "photographic mosaic," "three-dimensional editorializing," or words that related it to rapidly shifting images, such as movies or television. 7

At "The Family of Man," viewers walked though themed areas (Fig. 10.2). They came across familiar images, such as Lange's Migrant Mother (see Fig. 9-3), and met unfamiliar ones as well. At the end of the show, however, the seemingly open-ended themes became more directive. A display of photographs depicted three women, three men, and three children; next to these was placed a stark warning by British

314 I THE HUMAN FAMilY

philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) about the capacity of the hydrogen bomb to destroy all human life. Just beyond was a panel showing a dead soldier and a question posed by Sophocles: "Who is the slayer? Who the victim? Speak." Lastly, the viewer passed under an overhead lamp into a darkened area where a 6- by 8-foot back-lighted TRANSPARENCY

revealed a red-orange image of the 1954 U.S. hydrogen bomb test explosion on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The glowing picture erupted into the viewers' space, startling them after they had become accustomed to so many black-and­white images. The exhibition plan then directed viewers to a huge photograph of the United Nations General Assembly, and to a final series of images showing children at play. 8

Although public response to the show was over­whelmingly positive, some photographers objected to Steichen's transformation of their work into tonally harmonized, standard-format prints. Further, they charged that the show denigrated the skill involved in making photographs, and lessened the value of the medium just at the moment when it was?struggling for acceptance in art museums and galleries. A few critics also felt manipulated by Steichen's agenda, and questioned his underlying ideological message. Phoebe Lou Adams complained:

If Mr. Steichen's well-intentioned spell doesn't work, it can only be

because he has been so intent on the physical similarities that unite

"The Family of Man" that he has neglected to conjure the intangible

beliefs and preferences that divide men into countries and parties

and clans. And he has utterly forgotten that a family quarrel can be

as fierce as any other kind. 9

In his zeal to find international common ground from which to work against the widely feared nuclear cataclysm, Steichen had obliterated the specific cultural settings of the images. For example, Farm Security Administration photographs such as Migrant Mother were blended with other images of unspecified calamities. Images of workers from the Belgian Congo, Bolivia, Denmark, Germany, and the United States were thematically linked, without regard for the drastically unequal circumstances oflabor in those countries. Nathan Farbman's (1907-1988) photograph of an African storyteller in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) became part of a cluster of images on education, twisting its meaning to relate it to Western educational practices. In addition, Steichen ignored most popular forms of photography. He included a few snap­shots, but did not show photographs of everyday family life taken by non-professionals with unsophisticated equipment.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE

Steichen's focus on common humanity reflected a larger movement to affirm the basic rights of all peoples. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined those rights as the "common standard of achievement for all peoples and

10.2

PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN, "The Family o!Man" exhibition, January 24-May 8,1955. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

"The Family of Man" benefited from earlier experimental European installations, in which the viewer's route was directed. Walking through the show was like leafing through an issue of Life magazine. Indeed, Steichen modeled many aspects of the show on picture magazines­from the relative scale of the images, to the use of picture agencies, and the anonymity of the images' authorship.

all nations," and listed thirty articles, first among them the idea that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Each of the articles expressed human rights in terms of individual rights. Group, ethnic, racial, and national rights were pointedly absent from the list.10 As the historian Eric Sandeen concisely pointed out, the United Nations, like "The Family of Man," represented a Western view of universal community: "By using the rhetoric of international goals and principles, [the United Nations] bound the members together with one view of what was admirable and what was unacceptable in all human culture."ll Even as the United Nations announced its Universal Declaration, mainstream cultural outlets from Life to National Geographic were giving renewed attention to the very different proposals found in the theory of cultural relativism.

The concept of cultural relativism was developed by anthropologists in the I920S and I930S, and encompassed several interrelated ideas. It asserted that human values are not universally the same, but emerge from dissimilar cultural experiences. In an era when modernization seemed to mean the loss or diminution of diversity, cultural relativism accented the value of tradition. American anthropologist

Melville J. Herskovits (I895-I963) clearly articulated one of its core values: "Our civilization may indeed be recognized as in no way inherently superior to another ... and this is why the imposition of a foreign body of custom, backed by power is so distressing an experience."12 His ideas helped fuel an international human rights movement. Around the world, notions of cultural relativism sparked resistance to outside interference, whether it be military intervention, economic takeover, or the promotion of ideas that might erode cultural identity.

Within the United States and Europe, as well as in other parts of the world, those who disagreed with measuring material wealth as a standard of well-being turned to non­Western and unassimilated indigenous cultures as sources of alternative values. In the United States, photographers again journeyed to Native American groups, not to picture them as vanishing peoples, as had happened in the early twentieth century (see pp. I93-95), but to venerate spiritual wisdom and ethical values, which they thought were more in tune with the rhythms of nature than were the artificial demands of modern society. Through Navajo Eyes (I972), a report of the I966 project of Sol Worth (I922-I977) and John Adair

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE I 315

(I9I3-I977) to teach members of the Navajo community to use motion-picture cameras to assert their identity, enlivened many discussions about the potential of the camera to record non-Western experience.

Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union politicized the arts. Both superpowers used artists and exhibitions to promote themselves around the world. Among the major cultural programs of the United States Information Agency (U.S.LA.) was the tour of "The Family of Man," which traveled abroad from I955 to I962, appearing in thirty-eight countries to a total audience of 9 million people. With additional materials commemorating Hiroshima, the exhibition was mounted in Tokyo and at Ground Zero, the spot in Hiroshima where the atomic bomb exploded. The Soviet authorities even let the exhibit run in Moscow. Publicity framed the show as evidence of the individual freedom that fostered American prosperity, much as the art movement ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, with its gestural handling of paint and absence of realistic subject matter, was cast as an example of American intellectual freedom, in contrast to Soviet Socialist Realism. '4

The "American Way of Life," as it was called, derived from postwar economic prosperity, manifest in a housing boom, the growth of suburbs and shopping malls, and increased automobile use. It fostered the notion of material abundance as a universal gauge of societal achievement. The propaganda slogan implicitly disparaged "un-American" and "anti­American" societies-such as the Soviet Union, which offered fewer material comforts, but where all citizens were (at least in theory) seen as equal beneficiaries of centralized state-run programs, rather than lone competitors in a world governed by free-market capitalism.

Propaganda use of cultural objects during the Cold War set off the rapid politicization of artists and photographers. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where American art symbolized American political power and economic clout, photography came to be understood as a means to create and communicate a defiant, or at least oppositional, cultural identity.

CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

In the postwar period, many people living in Central and South America resented the extensive cultural, political, and economic influence of the United States. They attempted to forge a distinctive Latin American identity in the arts and in photography. These efforts were strengthened by reaction to U.S. interventions in South America and the Caribbean, beginning with the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in I96I, and including U.S. support of Augusto Pinochet (I9I5-2006), who overthrew the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende (I908-I973) in I973, and of the dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza (I925-I980) in Nicaragua throughout the I970s. As photographer and critic Fernando Castro (b. I952) recounts, "Latin American photographers

busied themselves exposing every trace of U.S. penetration they could find. Those who did not participate in this ideological purge, ridding themselves of any taste for U. S. art, dress, or speech, were branded alienados-alienated from their own people and culture."lS

In the years before World War II, Latin American photographers had responded positively to European experiments in photographic form, such as Surrealism (see Chapter Eight). In the decades after I945, a wide range of photographic practice persisted, from local photographers using nineteenth-century studio styles to those who were thoroughly conversant with contemporary international styles and techniques. This layering of practices could be found throughout the postcolonial world in the postwar period of modernization and nation-building. As in North America and Europe, photographers increasingly found work creating advertising and other commercial images. Throughout Latin America, photojournalism was carried out by press photographers attached to illustrated newspapers, or by freelancers, who sometimes :;;old their work through regional photographic agencies. Yet, despite the many professional photographers in Latin America, it was mostly foreign practitioners who were sent in when the area was portrayed in magazines abroad.

During the I959 Cuban Revolution, local photographers such as Raul Corrales (1925-2006) documented the progress of the struggle, along with foreign correspondents and photographers. Nevertheless, Cuban images were not purchased by international agencies, and most of the pictures of Cuba seen around the world were taken by foreign photographers. A significant exception was Alberto Dfaz (I928-2000), who created a defining image of the revolution (see Fig. 1003). In the early years of the Fidel Castro (b. I927) government, photojournalism played an important role in communicating ideas visually to a largely illiterate public. Castro reputedly waved a copy of Life magazine in front of one of his associates, saying "I want something like this"; Revoluci6n, a picture magazine, was soon founded. '6

In post-World War II Latin America, photography took many forms, ranging from the work of itinerants to fashionable portraits such as those made by Grete Stern, one of the partners in studio ringl + pit (see pp. 264-65), who emigrated from Germany to Argentina. Especially before the spread of the Polaroid photograph (see p. 363) in the late I960s, roving rural photographers used old-fashioned paper negatives, created in large wooden cameras constructed from parts of broken, older cameras. These itinerants used painted backdrops showing religious scenes or cityscapes, which they set up in designated spots for photographers near marketplaces and rural fairs. "Los Ambulantes," or the traveling ones, offered inexpensive portrait images (Fig. 10.5).17

During the I970s, Latin American documentarians, photojournalists, and art photographers sought to counteract simplistic or derogatory depiction by foreigners, while still

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE I 3'7