The Human Snapshot

The 1955 MoMA exhibition The Family of Man used a panorama of 503 photographs from 68 countries to construct an optimistic percept of the common human experience. Eventually travelling the world as an agent of U.S. cultural diplomacy, the exhibition has been criticized in the years since for its totalizing use of photography particularly from developing nations to draw a falsely universal and humanistic narrative. This handsome hardbound reader (drawn from an eponymous conference organized by Bard College s Center for Curatorial Studies and the LUMA Foundation and held in Arles, France in 2011) looks to The Family of Man as a starting point to examine the contemporary relationship between curatorial practice and human rights as they manifest in art and photography. Original contributions from cultural theorists, photo historians, curators, and artists wrestle with potential contemporary applications of the exhibition s themes. With contributions by Ariella Azoulay, Bassam El Baroni, Roger M. Buergel, George Didi-Huberman, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, Anselm Franke, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Maja Hoffmann, Denis Hollier, Thomas Keenan, Alex Klein, Suhail Malik, Marion von Osten, Katya Sander, Hito Steyerl, Eyal Weizman, Tirdad Zolghadr