Rethinking Sekula from the Global South: Humanist Photography Revisited

摘要

The photographic exhibition The Family of Man-a vast display of enlarged, cropped, cut, and recomposed black-and-white prints-was initiated in New York in 1955 during the height of the Cold War and under the cloud of McCarthyism in a still controversial curatorial tour de force by the Museum of Modern Art's curator of photography, Edward Steichen. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, the exhibition subsequently went on a world tour of sixty-one countries that lasted until 1962 and stretched from Europe to Latin America, from India and Japan to Africa and the Middle East. Steichen was the exhibition's initiator, orchestrator, and champion. He stewarded its journey across the world with missionary zeal and entrepreneurial prowess, armed with a vision of a unifying message for all the planet's people and a belief in the camera's capacity to provide a testament to a shared humanity that surpassed caste, class, and color. One of the most trenchant and influential critiques of the show was launched in Allan Sekula's "Traffic in Photographs" (1981), in which he systematically argues not only against the show's promotion of the bourgeois nuclear family as a transnational and transcultural unit but against the show's assertion of photography as a transparent, universally accessible language. For Sekula the show amounted to an endorsement of family-based consumerism consistent with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's efforts to promote American values, commodities, and culture abroad. Photography and the myth of its transparency, accessibility, and universalism served, Sekula argues, to underwrite an essentially expansionist, patriotic, and patriarchal project.