ABSTRACT
The underlying conception of The Family of Man has been criticized almost from its first days and is often repeated: in emphasizing sameness across cultures, Edward Steichen erased cultural difference, creating a sentimental ethnography of universal harmony. Steichen's argument, the readers might say, is addressed to the 'common man' and rests on the utopian premise, articulated by Rousseau, that the general will informs and legitimizes the power of the state. The iconography of the Arcadian skull goes back at least to Guercino's painting, Et in Arcadia Ego, in which the shepherds come across a death's head in a wooded area and stare at it pensively. The part of The Family of Man portrays the life cycle as a universal human experience, regardless of the specific culture or nationality. The threat of science is fulfilled in the full-page photograph of a bombed German city, Pforzheim, with the ruins of structures in the middle ground, half-standing walls and rubble.
