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LANGUAGE, INFORMATION, AND TECHNE
Fred Turner (Stanford), The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
Thursday April 04, 2013 | 04:15 -06:00 PM | TBA

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most
widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all
time, The Family of Man. For the last forty years, critics have
decried the show as a model of the psychological and political
repression of cold war America. This talk challenges that view. It
shows how the immersive, multi-image aesthetics of the exhibition
emerged not from the cold war, but from the World War II fight against
fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate
the senses of visitors and especially, to enable them to embrace
racial, sexual and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their
perceptual faculties in new modes of collective self-management. For
these reasons, the talk concludes, the exhibition became an
influential prototype of the immersive, multi-media environments of
the 1960s and of our own multiply mediated social world today.