A decade after the end of the Second World War, Edward Steichen gathered some five hundred pictures from around the world for an exhibition that modelled a cosmopolitan citizenship for a global population struggling to rebuild a world still in ruins. A noted maker himself, Steichen worked as curator-artist and combined modernist form with popular address to reimagine the art and the role of the medium.

The Family of Man opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, then toured forty-eight countries and was seen by almost ten million people. An original edition of the show is housed today at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg and has entered UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.