Hailed as the most successful and inspiring exhibition of photography ever assembled The Family of Man opened at The Museum of Modern Art in January 1955. This book, the permanent embodiment of Steichen’s monumental exhibition, reproduces all of the 503 images that Steichen described as “a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world... Photographs, made in all parts of the world, of the gamut of life from birth to death... Photographs of lovers and marriage and child-bearing... Photographs concerned with man’s dreams and aspirations and photographs of the flaming creative forces of love and truth and the corrosive evil inherent in the lie.” This is a classic and inspiring work, in print for more than forty years.

This book focuses from a chronological perspective on photography as a tool for a new visuality and the rupture of the role of the spectator: photographic exhibitions from 1928 to 1955, from the spaces designed by Lissitzky's to The Family of Man; the trajectory of utopian architectural-photographic space and from post-Revolutionary Russia to America during the Cold War. This space documents the exhibitions designed by Lissitzky (Pressa, Film und Foto, etc); German, Italian and Spanish exhibitions in the 1930s, and exhibitions in MOMA during the Second World War.