ABSTRACT
On one level The Family of Man certainly invited the viewer to experience it most immediately as a flow. However, this one-directional flow carried within it many eddies and countercurrents. Steichen’s design integrated, or tried to integrate, difficult and unpalatable truths as necessary conditions for accepting the exhibition’s concluding resolutions. The Family of Man was a comedy: it was governed by the mythos of spring and the spirit of union and reconciliation; its final image showed a boy and a girl walking together out of deep shadows into the bright sunlight of a leafy garden. The comparative readings of the images Smith have pursued should make it clear that the structures of rhyme and association that configured The Family of Man were equally available to any visitor attentive to the complexity and subtlety of Steichen's visual orchestration independently of its textual accompaniments.
