The World Family: the photography of Ken Heyman
When Margaret Mead and Ken Heyman published World Enough: Rethinking the Future, their goal was to create a book with a clear cut view of the world, out of the noise and abundance of messages man received about other societies. Mead, with her words and Heyman with his lens, sought to document our differences and at the same time, our commonalities. They called it a macro-scope, and hoped the book would be a definitive source for those looking to understand humanity and our trajectory in an uncertain world. Almost half a century later, a definitive source is regrettably subjective. Our sources are over saturated, plentiful and misleading, more so than Dr. Mead could have predicted. Today, determining what constitutes a trusted source means, as she would say, “sharpening the focus of our eyes and thought.”
Ken Heyman met Margaret Mead when he enrolled in her anthropology class at Columbia University in 1954. Two years later they would travel to Bali together. This was a return trip for Dr. Mead, and Ken photographed many of the same people she had studied there 20 years earlier. Almost 20 more years would pass before World Enough, and Ken returned to Bali. In this photo, he is holding up a photograph he had taken in the same village years before. The children are seeing for the first time, faces like their own, the faces of their family members, reflected back to them.
“They had never seen pictures before.”
- Ken Heyman
When Ken’s oldest child asked him what he was working on, he started to explain that this was to be a book about change. Looking at the pictures spread across his living room floor, he realized much of what he had recorded was, in fact, “unchangingness”. These lives were untouched by the changes going on in the world around them.
“We can become more human because we can think of the fates of all the peoples of this earth, at once, as part of one system.”
- Margaret Mead
World Enough is organized into 4 sections based on technological and social development. Dr. Mead argues much of the unprecedented human suffering of the present (this was written in 1975) is due to the misguided efforts of developing nations to extend technology around the globe.
What would she say about human suffering in our world today? Forty-five years ago, her solution was to reassess our notion of progress and consider nature and biology our primary source of knowledge. She advocated for a return to compassion and above all, science.
“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”
- Margaret Mead
Throughout his life, Ken chose to represent the diversity of the world while also showing us our shared human experience. The photos feel familiar, instantly identifiable, even though they may represent a culture or face far different than our own. This was the goal. To document lives full of contrast and make them comparable.
“The people looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.”
- Edward Steichen
When Ken Heyman embarked on World Enough he had already solidified his role as a photographic ambassador to the world. Ken Heyman published 46 books, two with Margaret Mead, always with the intention of showing his viewers the world family. His work is represented in the collections of museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art. He was a young man of 25 when he was invited by Edward Steichen himself to participate in the landmark show “Family of Man.” The exhibition was first shown in 1955 at the New York MoMA and toured the world for eight years.
“Although I had presented war in all its grimness in three exhibitions, I had failed to accomplish my mission. I had not incited people into taking open and united action against war itself. The failure made me take stock of my fundamental idea. What was wrong? I came to the conclusion that I had been working from a negative approach, that what was needed was a positive statement on what a wonderful thing life was, how marvelous people were, and above all, how alike people were in all parts of the world.”
- Edward Steichen
While reviewing his life’s work before passing in December of 2019, Ken hoped to revisit the themes of “Family of Man” once again. Celebrating our differences in culture while acknowledging our shared human experience is, perhaps, more relevant now than is was thirty years ago.
The RiseUP! Archive shares powerful imagery of the past to educate and encourage engagement in social issues affecting the world today.