http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/events/the_family_of_man_and_the_politics_of_attention_in_cold_war_america/
"The Family of Man" and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
CDDRL Seminar Series
DATE AND TIME
February 6, 2014
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
AVAILABILITY
Open to the public
No RSVP required
SPEAKER
Fred Turner - Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program
in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University
Abstract
In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and
widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time, The Family of Man. For
the last forty years, critics have decried the show as a model of the
psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk
challenges that view. It shows how the immersive, multi-image aesthetics of the
exhibition emerged not from the cold war, but from the World War II fight
against fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate
the senses of visitors and especially, to enable them to embrace racial, sexual
and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their perceptual faculties in new
modes of collective self-management. For these reasons, the talk concludes, the
exhibition became an influential prototype of the immersive, multi-media
environments of the 1960s – and of our own multiply mediated social world today.
Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program
in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford. He is the author of several
books on media technology and American cultural history. In January, the
University of Chicago Press published The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and
American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, from which
this talk is drawn.
LOCATION
Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160
Stanford, Ca 94305-2055
FSI CONTACT
Kathleen Barcos <[email protected]>
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