How can we recognize this world with finite extent as a globe? This question is the starting point of this study. This question leads us to another one: how do we represent the world? In this paper, I examined some cultural texts which seem to contribute to our view of the world. The texts which I chose here are exhibitions or collections which consist of several hundred photographs taken all around the world, specifically, from The Family of Man held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955, through photos with a similar theme, to Takeyoshi Tanuma's works produced with the theme‘children in the world’. In order to analyze such geographical representations, I adopted the method of literary criticism. Especially, I paid attention to the ‘order’of each text.
The feature of texts which I analyze in this paper is that while each photograph recorded the local context in which it was taken, these works themselves represented the global world. The globalist intent of these photographs was to promote cosmopolitanism, universalism, or humanitarianism, but it is sentimental and not persuasive. For example, photographs taken in the USA were 45% of all photographs carried in The Family of Man, and photographs of the Third World were distributed into specific sub-themes: labor, death, and war. The insistence of universality was asserted under the biological commonality of Man. Man is born, works, gets together, takes pleasure, feels sad, consists of male and female, belongs to a family, eats, talks, plays, suffers, and dies. Such a life path became a commonality among photographs of people around the world. On the other hand, in one text produced in 1994 by Tanuma' who has created many works in a Japanese context, photographs were arranged in order by region. I found a significant structure in the arrangement of this text. Compassion of Japanese on Third World people, identification with two continents, Africa and South America, as others for Japanese, and uninterchangeablity between advanced countries and Third World were found in the structure of this text.
From this analysis, I gained the insight that the World Order is a projection of‘a world’which is a logical unity consisting of whole objects and events in‘the world’ which is a concrete geographical space with finite extent. We can locate each event in a world informed by journalistic media about our world order as an idea which was formed by a world representation including the photographic texts selected here.
