A deluxe volume combining the text of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead and the photographer who worked with her in Bali and Mexico makes a bid for the market of The Family of Man. While the text moves from birth to the last reaches of life in full cycle, the accompanying photographs, although of the highest quality, do not achieve that range. Margaret Mead writes of the family as the continuing source of human life, the cradle, the teaching place for all future endeavor. She writes of mothers whose unconditional love is so essential, of fathers, representing the outside world to which children grow, families from atomic to tribal, brothers and sisters and grandparents, the child alone, friends, and that time when "the old rules lose their meaning," adolescence. Her text has an almost mythic ring as she tells the universal story of man, woman and child. Ken Heyman's pictures reveal the child at the breast, at play, at work, being comforted or taught, by themselves, with parents, grandparents. While together they form a poem in prose and photograph, they do not possess the completeness of human experience that made Family of Man so unique. For those seeking to renew that earlier revelation, the new Family may well speak.
