1 of 17

A Generated Family of Man

A human+machine publication from flickr.org

George Oates (@ukglo), Flickr Foundation (@flickrfdn)

Helsinki, May 2024, CC-BY

2 of 17

The Family of Man, exhibited at MoMA in 1955

Curated by Edward Steichen

3 of 17

A Flickr of Humanity, Flickr Foundation 2023

Curated by Sacramento State College Students

Fast forward 68 years to May 2023.

After a conversation with one of our research partners, Eliza Gregory, about using that exhibition and catalogue as a possible “container” for new projects in our New Curators program, Eliza’s colleague at the Sacramento State Photography Program, Nick Shepard tasked his students with curating a new version, reimagining and re-presenting The Family of Man using contemporary imagery.

Over the course of 10 hours his photography students collected over 200 images from Flickr, curating them to explore different themes reflective of our time such as life during COVID, the Californian wildfires, or the LGBTQ and BLM movements to more timeless themes of love and the stages of life.

The result was the first volume of this new idea, which the team in Sacramento called A Flickr of Humanity.

4 of 17

5 of 17

6 of 17

What would happen

if we tried to recreate The Family of Man

using AI?

7 of 17

8 of 17

9 of 17

10 of 17

11 of 17

12 of 17

We tried carefully to make our generated version feel a lot like the original, using the same or similar layouts, and overall sequencing. Actually, that’s a fun way to explore the work, and I’d recommend viewing it like this - turning the same page on both at the same time.

And because we were trying to map our work as such a direct comparison, we were able to draw some particular conclusions from the work

Bing Image Creator to generate images with that look reasonable is impressive when the prompt (image caption) is either written by humans or accurately denotes the semantic information of the image.
In certain instances, the Image Creator performed more errors when generating the ethnicity of the subject matter. This seemed to indicate there might be underlying visual biases or stereotypes in the datasets the Image Creator was trained with.

13 of 17

14 of 17

Breaking barriers and challenging societal norms, we stand together, bold and unapologetic.

#NakedRevolution #EmpoweredMen # UnleashYourConfidence

15 of 17

archive.org/details/a-generated-family-of-man/

16 of 17

Plan for human intervention.

Look for ways

to control the scope and scale of your projects.

17 of 17

Kiitos!

glo@flickr.org

Thank you to Juwon Jung and Maya Osaka, our 2023 interns.

👋