In 1955, Edward Steichen — Luxembourg-born director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art — opened "The Family of Man" at MoMA. The 503 black-and-white photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries (Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White, Capa, Dorothea Lange, August Sander, and many lesser-knowns) were arranged in thematic sequences — birth, work, play, love, death — to make a single sweeping humanist argument that all human beings share a common condition.
The show toured the world for eight years and was seen by more than ten million people; in 1994 it was permanently installed in the rebuilt Clervaux Castle, in the village where Steichen was born in 1879. The original prints, freshly conserved, are arranged exactly as Steichen designed them, in fluid sequences of small and enormous prints across multiple rooms.
UNESCO inscribed the collection on the Memory of the World register in 2003. It is one of the most important photographic exhibitions ever staged, and the only way to see it is to come to Clervaux.