Documentary 'Fakes': Edward Steichen's The Family of Man and 20th-Century American Photographic Discourse

Documentary 'Fakes': Edward Steichen's The Family of Man and 20th-Century American Photographic Discourse

Lecture
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Classics 110
family of man

This talk by Prof. Gerd Hurm (Trier Center for American Studies, University of Trier) will revisit key 20th-century debates about American documentary discourse which continue to be of central relevance for contemporary photography and visual studies discussions. It will radically revise and reconfigure in particular the debate about the most influential text/image installation in the history of photography, the 1955 'Chicago-inspired' Family of Man by the Luxembourg-born American artist Edward Steichen. Today, as nuclear weapons, environmental catastrophe, and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, and as new critical orientations are emerging in the Humanities, it is timely to revisit the transcultural aesthetics and pacifist politics of The Family of Man.

Gerd Hurm is a professor of American literature and director of the Trier Center for American Studies (TCAS) at the University of Trier, Germany. He is also an advisory board member of the new Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. His publications include books and articles on modernism, urban studies, political rhetoric, and American post-war culture, film, and photography. A senior Fulbright scholar, he has been active teaching and lecturing on a wide variety of American studies topics in Germany, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Great Britain, and the United States. His current research projects focus on the photography, aesthetics and curatorial politics of the Luxembourg-born American artist Edward Steichen. He is co-editor of The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age(IB Tauris, 2018). For more information, see https://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=64580.