Location
Chancellor Dunning Trust Lecture: Toward a Visual Declaration of Human Rights - Re-visitng the Family of Man
Tuesday, January 31, 2012. Location: Dunning Hall. 7pm.
Visiting scholar Ariella Azoulay will be presenting this year's Dunning Trust Lecture, reflecting upon the exhibition The Family of Man.
The exhibition The Family of Man (curator E. Steichen, 1955) was a landmark event in the history of photography and human rights. It was visited by millions of spectators the world over and was an object of critique that has become paradigmatic in the fields of visual culture and critical theory. Ronald Barthes was the leading voice. A contemporary revision of The Family of Man should start with questioning Barthes' precise and compelling observations and his role as a viewer. In my lecture I will argue that Barthes missed most of what the photographs in the exhibition showed, that what he claimed to see were invisible ideas, and that the hidden ideology he ascribed to the exhibition was similar to Stiechen's explicit intention in curating it. Instead of granting Steichen the position of an omnipotent author as Barthes did, I propose to pay close attention to the exhibition's potentialities, and instead of reading the photographs as descriptive statements with universal claims I propose to read them as prescriptive statements claiming universal rights.
