fremdwerke | dorothea lange and edward streichen's 'the family of man'.
dorothea lange, 'migrant mother'.
it's been six or seven years since i first saw the above picture by dorothea lange. it stuck with me like few others. i remember a friend asking whether i knew the story behind it. i did not. all the better, that the regular readings for my diplomacy lessons closed this gap today.
the picture is likely the most popular of edward streichen's exhibiton 'the family of man'. it encompassed 503 pictures taken by 273 photographers, professionals and amateurs alike. one might ask: how were these dimensions possible?
answer: 'the family of man' has been devised as a tool of cultural diplomacy by the US president Eisenhower in 1955. it represents his response to communisms rather successful public diplomacy of associating socialism with international peace. the US, meanwhile, were engaged in korea, not seeming peaceful at all in the eyes of the world public. nicholas cull argues the exhibiton was an important contribution to changing this perception:
"The pictures provided multifacted glimpses of human life in all its diversity, including courtship, birth and parenting, work, learning, self-expression, and beyond. [...] Within month of the exhibition opening in New York City, the USIA created two touring editions and sent one to Berlin and the other to Guatemala City. In Berlin, crowds three and four abreast flocked to see it. Many came from the eastern sector, wearing sunglasses to avoid being recognized. [...] In 1959 the show even opened in Moscow as part of the American National Exhibition that summer. [...] By 1962 when it stopped touring the exhibition had visited ninety-one locations in thirty-eight countries."
"The Family of Man was a remarkable piece of cultural diplomacy on many levels. It certainly succeeded as a work of art, winning friends for America by virtue of its emotional impact. On the surface it was not an argument for American culture specifically. It displayed many cultures and sought to emphasize their shared experiences. Only a few images were identifiably American, and these included images that showed the downside of life in the United States such as Dorothea Lange's pictures of dust bowl poverty in the 1930s. [...] Rather than crassely presenting America to the world, America presented the world to the world and gained credit thereby [...] To hammer the point home, short texts taken from the world's great holy books and political philosophers accompanied the pictures."
dorothea lange, title unknown.
quotation from: Cull, Nicholas J., ‘Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, no. 616, 2008, p. 40.
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