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The surprise film success in the United States in the summer of 2005 was March of the Penguins, a French-made nature documentary on the heroic mating habits of the emperor penguin in Antarctica. The American religious right endorsed the film with particular enthusiasm, celebrating the traditional family values demonstrated by the birds in their long, slow march from the sea to their breeding grounds and back again. Churches booked movie houses and organized visits for their congregations. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, announced that the “Penguins are really an ideal example of monogamy,” and other neo-conservative commentators reflected on the penguins' devoted child-rearing practices and penchant for familial sacrifice. March of the Penguins became the second-highest grossing documentary ever made, eclipsed only by Fahrenheit 9/1l, a film that also has something to say about family values and sacrifice. For American audiences that cared to make the connection, the pro-nature fable and the anti-war exposé came together around conceptions of globalism and isolation, as well as of family and hardship.
[1] Rich Lowry quoted by David Smith, “Film about the family life of penguins inspires America's religious right,” Guardian Weekly, 23-29 September 2005.
[2] Bertrand Russell, quoted in The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Maco Magazine Corporation, 1955), 179.
[3] For a publication on Yamahata's Nagasaki photographs in English that also includes a translation of the photographer's original introduction, see Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945, edited by Rupert Jenkins (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995).
[4] Jacob Dischin, “Family's Last Day: 270,000 Have Visited Steichen Exhibition,” New York Times, 8 May 1955.
[5] Edward J. Steichen Archives: Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York, VII 145.1. The most thorough account of the exhibition is by Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Another useful book is The Family of Man: 1955-2001, edited by Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004).
[6] Quoted from the archival records of the United States Information Agency by Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 194.
[7] Official Training Book for Guides at the American National Exposition in Moscow, edited by Dorothy E.L. Tuttle (Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, 1959), 12.
[8] Tomatsu Shomei quoted by Sandra S. Phillips, “Currents in Photography in Postwar Japan,” in Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, edited by Leo Rubenfien, Sandra S. Phillips, and John W. Dower (San Francisco Museum of Art, 2004), 51.
[9] The incident sparked a national campaign in Japan to ban nuclear weapons. Twenty million signatures were collected in support of the national and international anti-nuclear movement. See Nakagawa Masami, Honda Masakazu, Hirako Yoshinori and Sadamatsu Shinjiro, “Bikini: 50 Years of Nuclear Exposure,” Asahi Shimbun, January 26, 27, 28, 2004, translated for Japan Focus by Kyoko Selden.
[10] Publicity notice, “Museum of Modern Art Plans International Photography Exhibition,” 31 January 1955, Steichen Archives, Museum of Modern Art.
[11] Joe O'Donnell, Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs from Ground Zero (Nashville: University of Vanderbilt Press, 2005).
[12] Walker Evans, “Robert Frank,” US Camera 1958 (New York: US Camera Publishing Corporation, 1957), 90.
[13] Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (St Albans, Hertfordshire: Picador, 1976), 100-102.
[14] The source of the photograph was not identified in The Family of Man exhibition or catalogue.
[15] Phoebe Lou Adams, “Through a Lens Darkly,” Atlantic 195, April 1955, 69.
[16] Wayne Miller interviewed by Sandeen, cited in Picturing an Exhibition, 50.
[17] Steichen speaking in The Family of Man, a 26 minute-film produced by the United States Information Agency in 1955. The agency made more than 300 prints of the film, and circulated them in both 16 mm and 35 mm.
[18] Adams, “Through a Lens Darkly,” 72.
[19] Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1995), 41.
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