History of Photography — Module 10: From Universalism to Cultural Relativism, 1945–1975

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, between 1945 and 1975, global photography underwent a profound shift from the universalist social realism embodied by Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition, "The Family of Man," to a deeply focused embrace of cultural relativism. While Steichen deliberately homogenized images to emphasize a common humanity against Cold War anxieties, international photographers increasingly rejected this sweeping narrative, which many equated directly with American imperial aspirations. Instead, post-war and post-colonial photographers emphatically documented distinct regional histories, indigenous vitality, and political resistance. By photographing marginalized communities, oppressive regimes, and the deep scars of war, practitioners globally forged distinctive, culturally specific visual identities.

The Flaw of Photographic Universalism

"The Family of Man" (1955): Edward Steichen’s MoMA exhibition aimed to highlight the "essential oneness of mankind" to soothe public fears of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation.
Homogenization of Context: To achieve universal harmony, Steichen purposefully stripped photographs of their original titles, cropped them, and removed images that showed strong political or cultural differences.
The Backlash: Critics, notably Roland Barthes, argued this forced universalism suppressed the determining weight of history and equated the idea of a global "community" with American imperial aspirations.

Rise of Cultural Relativism

A New Philosophical Focus: Cultural relativism asserted that human values are not universally the same, but emerge instead from dissimilar, specific cultural experiences.
Resistance to Americanization: Photographers around the world rejected the overarching "American Way of Life," harboring resentment against perceived cultural imperialism and focusing instead on forging distinct regional identities.

Shifting the Lens to the Marginalized

Indigenous Populations: Photographers shifted from viewing indigenous groups as "vanishing peoples" to venerating their spiritual and ethical values. Claudia Andujar vividly documented the vitality of the Yanomami people in Brazil, framing the destruction of their habitat as a moral deficiency of the invading culture.
Victims of Discrimination: In South Africa, photographers like Ernest Cole (House of Bondage) and Peter Magubane operated under severe risk to document life under apartheid, using photography as a tool for political resistance.
People with Mental Challenges: Photographers turned toward other unassimilated groups, such as Sara Facio and Alicia D'Amico documenting the harsh realities of a state-run mental institution in Argentina.

Documenting National History
and Post-War Trauma

Japan and the Atomic Scars: Japanese photographers focused heavily on the physical and psychic trauma of the atomic bomb, pushing back against traditional aesthetic rules.
Shomei Tomatsu created subjective, expressionistic images of bomb-induced scars and recovery in Nagasaki.
Eikoh Hosoe used ancient Japanese myths in his series Kamaitachi to visually narrate the anxiety of the nuclear blast and creeping American influence.
African Independence and Identity: Seydou Keïta infused the Western portrait with African qualities, creating lively images of modern town life that contrasted sharply with European anthropological photography. Meanwhile, Ricardo Rangel shot images aligned with the struggle for independence in Mozambique.
Indian History and Regionalism: Photojournalists like Sunil Janah chronicled major transitions like the 1943–44 famine and India's independence, while Raghubir Singh used color photography to explore the distinct regional characteristics of the country.

Edward Steichen organized "The Family of Man" in 1955 with the conviction that photography could do what politics could not: find the common ground beneath the divisions of the Cold War. He gathered 2.5 million photographs submitted from around the world, chose about five hundred from sixty-eight countries, stripped them of their original titles, cropped them to a standard process, harmonized their tones in a commercial lab, and arranged them around universal themes: birth, work, love, death. The show traveled to thirty-eight countries and was seen by nine million people. It remains one of the most attended photography exhibitions in history.

The criticism came quickly and has not stopped. Roland Barthes identified the show's "ambiguous myth of the human community" as something that suppressed the determining weight of history. Images of agricultural workers from the Belgian Congo, Bolivia, Denmark, Germany, and the United States were placed side by side as if the circumstances of labor in those countries were equivalent. The Farm Security Administration's Migrant Mother, which had been made as evidence in a specific political argument about rural poverty in Depression-era America, was blended with images of unspecified calamities from other continents. The show was not a lie. It was something more subtle: a large, sincere, carefully curated argument that used the appearance of universalism to smooth over the particular circumstances that made each image what it was. French critic Roland Barthes put it plainly. The myth of the human family, he wrote, was American imperial aspiration wearing the costume of humanitarianism.

What happened in the decades after the show is the story of photography asserting its particularity. In Latin America, photographers organized regional colloquiums and mounted exhibitions explicitly built around the idea that their visual identity was not a subset of the American version. Cuban photographers documented the revolution; Mexico City street photographers showed the urban poor as animated actors in their own world rather than subjects awaiting the camera's sympathy. Claudia Andujar spent years photographing the Yanomami people of northern Brazil, using extreme tonal contrasts to render her subjects as vital rather than vanishing, and eventually gave up photography entirely to lobby the government for a reserve the size of Portugal to protect them. Alberto Korda made the portrait of Che Guevara that became the most reproduced photograph of the twentieth century. Korda's background was in advertising and fashion photography. The portrait's formal power (the cropping, the composition, the way Guevara's gaze holds the frame) came directly from that training.

In South Africa, where press photography was legally reserved for white practitioners, photographers found ways around the restriction. Peter Magubane hid his camera in a loaf of bread and photographed outside the courthouse during a political trial. Ernest Cole spent years documenting the architecture of apartheid and published the results as House of Bondage. David Goldblatt spent forty years photographing the ordinary surfaces of daily life under racial segregation, building a record whose quiet power derived precisely from what it refused to dramatize. In Japan, photographers were working through the specific weight of 1945. Yosuke Yamahata spent August 10, 1945, the day after the Nagasaki bombing, making 119 photographs of the city's ruins. The images were suppressed by the American occupation for seven years. When Shomei Tomatsu later photographed the bomb's survivors, he positioned subjects at the edge of the frame, obscured faces with shadows, and said that Nagasaki had two times: 11:02 on August 9, 1945, and all the time since then. The photographs were about duration, not event.

What this period made unmistakably clear was that the camera does not see in a universal language. It sees from a position. The position is cultural, political, economic, and personal. Steichen understood this as well as anyone. He had spent his career moving between Pictorialism, fine art, fashion, advertising, and military photography, each time adapting his visual decisions to the context and the audience. What "The Family of Man" attempted was to suspend all of that in service of a single argument. The photographers who pushed back were not rejecting the idea that photography could communicate across cultural lines. They were insisting that communication requires specificity, that the particular is not an obstacle to being understood but the only means by which understanding becomes possible.