o_ Man!

In o_ Man!, Kelli Connell and Natalie Krick use collage, reappropriation, and wordplay as subversive tools to interrogate photography’s past.

In 1955, Edward Steichen organized The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichen, photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair and director of the photography department at MoMA, ambitiously sought to describe universal aspects of human experience.

The exhibition was an unprecedented success, even as scholars, writers, and artists quickly critiqued its Western-centric and sentimental narrative.

Connell and Krick expand this long legacy of critical-looking by reinterpreting Steichen’s images, and photographs and original language from The Family of Man catalog. o_ Man! challenges the male dominated history of photography and raises questions of patriarchal authority, power, and bodily autonomy vital to our political time.

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