Date/Time
Date(s) - 18/06/2024
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Location
C²DH Open Space (4th floor MSH) and online
Categories
Lecture by Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History, New York University Abu Dhabi.
The Family of Man was an exhibition of some five hundred photographs from around the world, curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1955. After its installation at MoMA, and under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, copies of the exhibition then toured close to fifty countries. By the end of its international tour the exhibition had been seen by almost ten million people, making it the most successful event of the early decades of the cultural Cold War. This paper will consider the international reception of The Family of Man. Taking India and Japan as case studies, it will suggest the ways in which intersection of Steichen’s work and conception with local social and political circumstances inflected and reshaped the meanings of the exhibition.
Shamoon Zamir is Professor of Literature and Art history at New York University Abu Dhabi. His previous publications on photography include The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian (2014), Helen Levitt: New York (2021) and Yasser Alwan: Egypt Every Day (2022). He co-edited The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in the Global Age (2018) and has recently completed a book on The Family of Man.
Link to Online Meeting: https://unilu.webex.com/unilu/j.php?MTID=m17796bf6c68cac19ce563354b4d1363b