The family of man and its echoes in international photography exhibitions in Croatia during the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The American photography exhibition The Family of Man was opened in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This project of the Luxembourg-American photographer Edward Steichen was a great success in the USA, but also globally, because soon after its closing in New York, five different versions of it went on tour around the world. The exhibition was shown in 38 countries, and its world tour was funded by the United States Information Agency, whose mission was to inform the world about the American society, culture, and politics. Many aspects of The Family of Man indicate the orientation of American cultural policy in the 1950s, some elements of which stem from situations in the 1930s and 1940s. Steichen was influenced by photographs taken for the needs of the Farm Security Administration, which showed scenes of rural poverty in the United States during the Great Depression. Influence on Steichen can also be found in the 1948 series of reports People are People, the World Over published in Ladies' Home Journal, where everyday life in various parts of the world was illustrated from a sociological and anthropological point of view. With all the messages it intended to send, The Family of Man primarily showed how the Americans imagined an American family as the exclusive nucleus of social life. This unquestionable and at that time unavoidable image of the world did not include photographs of the Holocaust, which was followed by the avoidance of other “undesirable” content. Steichen's exhibition toured Yugoslavia twice. Its second version, with small changes compared to the one shown at MoMA, visited Belgrade in 1957, and the following year a new, slightly modified version was shown in Zagreb, at the Fairgrounds, which in the 1950s became a place where the visitors could get acquainted with the “American dream”. In the 1950s and 1960s, international exhibitions in Croatia followed the pattern set by The Family of Man in that they juxtaposed the forces of good and evil, on the one hand readily presenting topics that emphasized family, love, and marital relations, linking them with social life, music, dance, education, science and religion, while on the other avoiding other subjects such as loneliness, suffering, violence, death, or war. The growing Americanization of the countries behind the Iron Curtain and the close relations between the USA and Yugoslavia probably influenced the choice of subjects in photographs shown at the international exhibitions in the country. The Family of Man had set the rules that many photographers were now following. On many levels, it promoted the American way of life and worldview, presented through the medium of photography. At the same time, international photography salons were organized in Croatia, primarily with the aim of presenting to the public the activities of various schools of photography or photo clubs, where their work was evaluated through the successes of their members at juried group exhibitions. The similarity of subjects in the exhibited works shows the impact that the “American exhibition” had on many photographers and jury members of the photography salons during the 1950s and 1960s, as they adopted the subjects presented by Steichen to the public as the desirable photographic narrative of their own events.