Empathy with these hundreds of human beings truly expands our sense of values. Expressing the contrary view, Cora Alsberg and George Wright, partners and freelance writers, co-wrote a response ‘One Family’s Opinion’ in the same Aperture issue devoted to the show, that; Any really great photographer, like a great painter, creates his own visual universe...You can distinguish a Gene Smith from a Cartier Bresson without a signature. You can instantly recognize an Adams, a Weston, a Laughlin print, or that of any mature worker whose previous work you've seen...But mixed with others in a show, he surrenders this individuality-just as a writer might if he gave permission for single paragraphs to be quoted by an editor in any sequence and in any context. Hilton Kramer, then managing editor of the magazine Arts, asserted a negative view, one taken up by more recent critics, that The Family of Man was a; self-congratulatory means for obscuring the urgency of real problems under a blanket of ideology which takes for granted the essential goodness, innocence, and moral superiority of the international 'little man; 'the man in the street: the active, disembodied hero of a world-view which regards itself as superior to mere politics. Roland Barthes too was quick to criticise the exhibition as being an example of his concept of myth - the dramatization of an ideological message. In his book Mythologies, published in France a year after the exhibition in Paris in 1956, Barthes declared it to be a product of "conventional humanism," a collection of photographs in which everyone lives and "dies in the same way everywhere ." "Just showing pictures of people being born and dying tells us, literally, nothing." Many other noteworthy reactions, both positive and negative, have been proffered in social/cultural studies and as part of artistic and historical texts. The earliest critics of the show were, ironically, photographers, who felt that Steichen had downplayed individual talent and discouraged the public from accepting photography as art. The show was the subject of an entire issue of Aperture; "The Controversial 'Family of Man'" Walker Evans disdained its "human familyhood [and] bogus heartfeeling" Phoebe Lou Adams complained that "If Mr. Steichen's well-intentioned spell doesn't work, it can only be because he has been so intent on [Mankind's] physical similarities that...he has utterly forgotten that a family quarrel can be as fierce as any other kind." Some critics complained that Steichen