Steichen’s choice of photographs assumes a human condition or a human nature
shared by everybody. By purporting to show that individuals are born, work,
laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, “The Family of Man” denies the
determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences,
injustices, and conflicts. Arbus’s photographs undercut politics just as
decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly
isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships. The
pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the
Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. One does so by
universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by atomizing it, into
horror.
