This is the Modern World

CIVILIZATION: The Way We Live Now is an ambitious, thought-provoking and visually stunning attempt to summarise contemporary society in photos. Nigel Atherton talks to curator William A Ewing

-  Nigel Atherton

How would you go about defining the full spectrum of 21st-century human civilisation in photographs? That was the question that world-renowned photography curator William A Ewing asked himself back in 2010. Such an exhibition would need to be epic in scale - like Edward Steichen's seminal Family of Man exhibition which toured the world in the 1950s and was seen by nine million people. It would be very expensive to stage and would need the support of major museums and galleries around the globe in order to be a success. Fortunately, Ewing managed to make all of these things happen. The resulting exhibition, Civilization: The Way We Live Now, comprises over 350 images by some of the world's leading photographers, and is one of the most astonishing, thought-provoking and visually spectacular displays of photography you are ever likely to see.

'The exhibition is an attempt to step back and think about this planetary-wide civilisation we have created, ever more globalised, ever more homogenised,' explains Ewing. 'First of all it's about a planetary civilisation, something we all share. Secondly, it's collective. We forget in this time where we worship individuality, and the cult of celebrity, that most of our human achievements are collective in nature. We don't build iPhones at home in our basements, we don't build our own cars, planes and submarines, we don't build skyscrapers individually. It's a collective effort. Thirdly, civilisation is cumulative: every generation adds its own onion skin layer.'

The task of staging an exhibition on this scale is a daunting prospect that few curators in the world would have the experience and ability to pull off but Ewing, who could almost be described as an anthropologist who works through the medium of photography, was confident of its potential from the beginning.