Photography: Witness and Recorder of Humanity
Author(s): Edward Steichen
Source: The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring, 1958), pp. 159-167
Published by: Wisconsin Historical Society
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Those who attended the Society's annual
meeting at Green Lake in June of 1957
of
enjoyed a unique opportunity--that
considered
man
the
by many as
hearing
the world's leading authority on creative
photography discuss his art, its relation
to history, and the personal philosophy
behind his universally acclaimed Family
of Man Exhibit. Here, together with
an abridgement of Mr. Steichen's address, we are privileged to reproduce
some of the photographs from the exhibition that has stirred the imagination of
the world and with which Edward
Steichen's name will be forever linked.
Photography:Witness
and Recorderof Humanity
by Edward Steichen
Man's first knowledge of the world we live in
and how it was fifty million years ago is based
on images that are in fossil form preserved in
rock. Man's first images, first means of communication, go back to the Stone and Ice Ages
when images were painted on the walls of
caves. Man's first non-oral means of communication was calligraphy-images.
Today we have this extraordinarynew process for making images and a great world of
photographers that is making them. Today,
whether a piece of film is exposed in a cyclotron wherein neutrons and protons make selfportraits, or whether it is in the recording of
the drama that took place in Budapest,photography is-in the historian's role peculiar to
it-producing historical documents. Photography is many things, but this is one of its
important phases. Any photograph that is
made-the very instant it is completed, the
very instant the button has been pressed on the
camera-becomes a historical document. Its
use as such will depend largely on historians.
I want to emphasize what I conlsider the
most importantservice photographycan render
history, and that is in the recording of human
relations, in the explaining of man to man. If,
as Pope said, "The proper study of mankind
is man," then it is the artist-photographerwho
in photographing his fellow man with understanding, with sympathy and warmth, gives us
something that comes out of his pictures and
remains with us; something that helps us to
know and understand each other. When the
camera is used by an artist, while retaining its
mechanical objectivity, it becomes an additional tool for penetrating beneath the surface
appearance of things. It is the artist with the
camera who by his knowledge, sensitivity, and
experience sees the significance of appearances.
These influence him in the selection of what he
photographs, in how he photographs it; and
the result assumes an added meaning. In the
photographing of human relations it is the
artist who gives us our real and enduring
material.
As a result of a survey that was made there
are said to be forty million homes in the
United States that have at least one camera. In
that light, consider the potentialities and possibilities of this medium. That means there are
at least forty million photographers, forty million potential historians. And there lies a responsibility: What to do about this? How to
direct this? Above all, how to select the resultant material for preservation?
To illustrate what I mean by responsibility,
let me draw on my own experience in two
World Wars. In World War I, I was in command of all aerial photography under Billv
Mitchell, a former Milwaukeean like myself.
I had fifteen photographic sections in my command, and thirty-two squadrons were employed
in doing nothing but taking pictures. It was all
very primitive; we had to improvise everything. But we made over a million photographs.
Here was a kind of history of the war that
159
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Czechoslovakia. Robert C:apa lMagnum
could not be duplicated.Yet no one knows what
became of all those photographs! I know they
were packed carefully, section by photographic
section with a record of the work of each, and
they were shipped to Washington. But since
then, no one has been able to find them. They
may not be lost: they may turn up in some
warehouse someplace, molded, or rotted, or
bleached. But it is of importance to historians
-a responsibility of historians-to see that
such valuable documents are preserved.
During World War II, I was first in charge
of a small photographicunit of six top-ranking
young photographers whose duty it was to
photograph naval aviation. During the height
of operations the Secretary of the Navy
placed me in command of the entire combat
photography-four thousand photographers
photographing everything from pictures for
aerial maps to the shattered, hopeless look on
a surgeon's face (and on the nurses') when
they were operating on a boy who had been
torn apart by shrapnel and they knew they
could do nothing for him.1 Those records have
been carefully preserved; each photographhas
been filed under the name of the photographer
who made it; then cross-indexed for all purposes. This is very unlike the Brady photo1Edward Steichen, The Blue Ghost: A Photographic
Log and Personal Narrative of the Aircraft Carrier USS Lexington in Combat Operation (Harcourt
Brace, New York, 1947; and Edward Steichen,
comp., Power in the Pacific (U.S. Camera Publishing
Corp., New York, 1945.)
graphs of the Civil War. We don't know who
made them because Brady had a staff working
with him. The Navy, I believe, appreciates the
importanceof these World War II photographs
and will take care of them for historians.
But responsibility does not lie solely in the
preserving of photographic records. There is
also a responsibility in the making of them,
and it is my belief that scholastic and academic
circles have been inordinately delinquent in
the use of the image in educating our young.
We have in photographya medium which communicates not only to us English-speaking
peoples, but communicates equally to everybody throughout the world. It is the only universal language we have, the only one requiring
no translation; but in all our universities it is
a stepchild. We have elaborate courses in art
in each university: sometimes there may be a
camera club. But what we need are academic
courses to bind the other resources of the
university with photographyin order to create
better photographersthan we have.
I plead for a greater use of photography. I
plead for upsetting the conditioning which
habits people to the word. The word and the
book are our priceless possessions. But it is
our duty to marry the image to the word and
let them speak together. In the photographic
exhibit, "The Family of Man," which I organized for the Museum of Modern Art, thisthrough the use of appropriate captions and
quotations-is precisely what I tried to do.
160
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All photographs courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Behind that exhibit lay a threefold purpose:
to show the relationship of man to man; to
demonstratewhat a wonderfully effective language photography is in explaining man to
man; and to express my own very firm belief
that we are all alike on this earth, regardless
of race or creed or color.
This conviction is something that began in
my life as a young boy in Milwaukee. My
mother had a millinery store on Third Street,
and I came home from school when I was
about seven or eight years old and as I closed
the door of the store I yelled out to a boy in
the street, "You dirty kike!" My mother called
me over to her-she was waiting on a customer-and asked me what I had said. I freely
repeated it; and so she excused herself from
her customer,locked the door of the store, and
took me upstairs to our apartment. There for
hours she talked to me about how wrong that
was, because all people were alike; that I was
in America because in bringing me to America
she had hoped I would have a chance in a
world that didn't have that thing. She told me
how distressed she was; how heartsick she
was that I didn't seem to understand that.
That's where my exhibition really beganwith a great woman and a great mother.
To assemble this exhibition, my staff and
myself went through over 2,000,000 photographs to select the material. This 2,000,000
was boiled down through our preliminary selection to 10,000, and then I to6k over entirely.
Boiling it down from 10,000 to 5,000 was
relatively simple; but from then on it was a
heartbreaking struggle to reduce it to the
final 500-odd prints that constituted the final
choice.
The exhibition, as those who have seen it
know, opens with a vast panorama of water
and sky, with captions from the Bible or its
equivalent from five different religions or
races. The first is an Egyptian inscription
about creation. There is the Chinese, the Indian, and so on. While we can not photograph
the past, we did seek to bring to the exhibition
Austria. Ted Castle
Palestine. John Phillips
Life
Magnum,
AFSC
Austria. Ted Castle Magnum, AFSC
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a dimension of the past in the captions that
go with the photographicgroups. We searched
through the Scriptures, the great literature,
the works of philosophers and scientists of all
ages to cull these captions. For instance, the
caption on the picture of a baby being born
is taken from Scriabin: "The universe resounds with the joyful cry I am." Then there
are pictures of mothers and their babies. The
babies start to grow, the children start to grow
up and to play and to learn. There is a series
of father and child, fathers and sons: a socalled savage in Africa teaching his boy to
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shoot a poisoned hunting arrow; a Negro
father leaning with tenderness and care over
a sick child; a father going off to war saying
goodbye to his son; and finally a father and
son, both of them stretched out on the sofa,
reading the Sunday newspaper.
From there we go into a room of work; and
in the center of that room-the focal point of
the entire exhibition-is a group of families:
a family from Bechuanaland, said to be contemporary cave men; an American family
photographed in Nebraska-a wonderful picture of good, hearty, earthy farmers posed
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4
WISCONSIN
SPRING, 1958
MAGAZINE OF HISTORY
lovely, buxom young women singing, pounding the wash with ladles on the rocks, as they
do still in many parts of the world. And right
next to it was a picture of a maze of wash
lines in Harlem, extending between flats, looking like a million sheets and towels and shirts
and pants hanging out on the line.
Then there was bread-food. On a field of
wheat I placed the smallest picture in the
exhibition; a tiny picture that I made years
ago of my mother. The family was living at
Elmhurst, Illinois, at the time, and I was
visiting. I had the camera out in the yard,
photographingthe house and the porch. I was
all set to make a picture of the porch, with
grape vines growing over it and shrubs on
either side. My mother opened the screen door,
came out, and held forward a big cake she
had just baked, saying, "Now here's some-
around an old kitchen stove. In the center is
a grandmother in a rocking-chair, silver.
haired, surrounded by her children and her
grandchildren; and on the wall behind, a row
of grim-looking ancestors. Then there is an
Italian family and a Japanese family and a
Hungarian family. Wherever you turned in
the exhibition you saw this grouping of family
and were reminded: "This is the root. The
family unit is the root of the family of man,
and we are all alike." All of these were posed
pictures. All of the families were frankly having their pictures taken: all had the same bland
expressions everybody always has when he is
having his picture taken; but there was something very sweet and holy about this group.
There was a section on women's work in
different lands. There was a picture from Austria; women doing their washing in a stream:
U.S.S.R. RobertCapa Magnum, Ladies' Home Journal
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thing worth photographing."And I did. With
the photographI used an old Russian proverb:
"Eat bread and salt and speak the truth." My
r~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
mother didn't happen to know that proverb,
but it sounded like her, and that's the reason
I associated it with her picture.
Then there were people in all countries,
eating. There was a Russian family-farmers
-all seated around a table eating soup out of
one bowl, all except the baby. The baby had
a separate dish. This kind of warmth went
through the whole thing.
There was education: an Arab child doing
his alphabet; next, a picture of the hands of
an old woman learning to write; then a group
of scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton. Beside the picture of Einstein I
placed one of a small boy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, doing his sums at the blackboardone and two make three. There were pictures
of atomic scientists, and the last picture on the
wall was of a blasted city in Germany, crumbled in ruins, and in the foreground a boy
going down a flight of steps with a knapsack
on his back, a schoolboygoing to school, begin-
ning all over again to surmount man's monstrous stupidity.
We had things in the exhibition that none
of us had ever dreamed of before as possibilities. We had the game of ring-around-a-rosy
from sixteen different countries, and we placed
the pictures all in a circle.
Then there was a room where human aloneness was stressed. In it was a picture of a
woman, disheveled and only partly clothed,
sitting crumpled on a bench in an insane
asylum. There was a child on a beach, leaning
against a post. The beach was empty except
for two or three people off in the distance. The
aloneness of that child was gripping. But the
most alone picture in the series was of a man
and his wife and daughter waiting for a
parade. The woman was leaning on a bench
in front of her, and she was the most alone of
them all.
From loneliness we went to compassion, the
emotion that carries with it the wonderful,
warm, human gesture of putting your arms
around somebody. To me, the climax of that
series was a picture of a shell-shocked boy
being comforted by an older soldier who had
his arm wrapped around the boy.
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And then came hard times, the hard times
that happen to people all over the world. There
was a picture of a gaunt American woman
with three children. You could see that they
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were hungry and that she was worried. And
there was a picture taken in another part of
the country of a man with his two children,
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miserable because he had no work. Famine
was depicted; people starving in India, in
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From hard times and hunger the exhibition
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moved on to revolt, beginning with the picture
of a little baby caught between two chairs and
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trying to fight his way out; ending with a picture taken at the time of the revolt in Eastern
Germany-young men throwing stones at a
heavily-armed tank, the quintessence of the
spirit of man in rebellion against injustice.
Another section dealt with voting, with a
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folk-in Japan, China, France, the United
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that has been taken in my lifetime.
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Then came a warning; the only place in the
exhibition in which I overtly editorialized.
There was a series of nine faces, three men,
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three women, three children. One was the
photograph of a child perhaps three or four
years old taken the day after the bomb hit
Nagasaki-a Japanese child with a bleeding
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face, dry-eyed, looking straight at us and asking, as all the faces asked, "Why?" Captioning
France. Hans A. Schreiller
that series was a quotation from Bertrand
Russell warning that "the best authorities are
unanimousin saying that a war with hydrogen
bombs is quite likely to put an end to the
human race . .. there will be universal deathsudden only for a fortunate minority, but for
the majority a slow torture of disease and
disintegration."
From there one walked into a darkened
room in front of which was the photograph of
a dead soldier lying in a trench, taken on
Eniwetokduring the last war. In that darkened
room was a great picture of the hydrogen
test-bombbeing exploded on that same island.
There is, in such pictures of explosions, a kind
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STEICHEN : PHOTOGRAPHY
of untruth, an untruth in many war pictures,
because they look so beautiful. As I was going
through that room I once heard a man say,
"It looks like a beautiful sunset. The last sunset." In that case, at least, I felt that the picture
had told its story.
Leaving that room you came upon, saw
facing you, ten pictures from different countries showing men and women who had lived
their lives together, had never heard of Reno;
and with these pictures was a quotation from
Ovid: "We two form a multitude." On each
picture the caption reappeared: "We two form
a multitude." And they were all looking towards the darkened room that held the photograph of the hydrogen bomb. Then you saw
the largest picture in the exhibition, a picture
of the United Nations in session, also facing
the room with the bomb; and across that picture was the preambleof the UN charter beginning: "We, the peoples of the United Nations,
determined to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war, which twice in our
lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind..."
Then you swung around and were in a
forest of children. One portrait was of a Javanese girl-child with a basket of flowers: others
were of children from many lands, experiencing the universal joyousness and curiosities of
childhood. Here, the picture before the last,
was one of the earliest photographs in the
exhibition-a photograph by Lewis Carroll
of the original Alice of Alice in Wonderland.
The last picture was Eugene Smith's wonderful
image of two little children walking out of a
dark tunnel of leaves into the sunlight.
When the Museum of Modern Art made
plans to send the exhibition around the world
I was greatly concerned as to what would
happen in countries with an ideology entirely
different from our own. I was particularly
concerned about India and Japan. But I need
not have been, for the exhibition is now in ten
editions, three circulating throughout the
United States, seven being circulated by the
U.S. Information Agency throughout the
world, while two small editions are still on
exhibit in Japan. The largest attendance in
any one day was in Calcutta where 29,000
people crowded into the exhibition hall on a
hot, blistering day. Over 3,500,000 people have
U.S.A. Dan Weiner
seen the exhibit; a million copies of the book,
The Family of Man, have gone all over the
world. In Holland, a country where they rarely sell books not having a Dutch text, 35,000
copies were sold in two weeks.2
This is irrefutableproof that photographyis
a universal language; that it speaks to all people; that people are hungry for that kind of
language. They are hungry for pictures that
have meaning, a meaning they can understand.
Here is a great historic tour. Here is an
exhibition that is making history. And it has
been received with such love and reverence. I
have seen it now in three countries, America,
France, and Germany. I have seen it in nine
cities. The reaction in each case is exactly the
same; and I believe-at first I was puzzledbut I believe now that the answer is that people participate in the exhibition personally:
they feel they are a part of it. As a Japanese
poet said: "When you look into the mirror, it
is not you that sees your reflection; your reflection sees you." These people look into the
mirror of life and their reflection looks back
at them and smiles.
2Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (Museum
of Moder Art, New York, 1955).
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