Witold Wirpsza’s book of poetry “The Family of Man – Comments on photographs” was published for the first time in 1962. In it, the author alluded directly to the famous photographic exhibition The Family of Man, prepared by Edward Steichen, director of the Department of Photography in New York's Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was presented for the first time on 26 January, 1955. It was later shown in 37 countries (the number of visitors who saw it over this period is estimated at over 9 million). The exhibition arrived in Poland in 1959, thanks to Bronisław Schlabs, painter and eminent photographer, representative of the trend known as subjective photography, whose work has been exhibited abroad, including at the Museum of Modern Art. Wirpsza mentioned that for many months there had been a fashion here for this exhibition (it could be seen in Warsaw, Wrocław and Poznań, and individual photos were reprinted by daily and trade newspapers alongside quite a number of discussions and comments by critics of photography, as well as the artists themselves). Wirpsza was impressed by the technical excellence displayed in the pictures. His attitude to the exhibition changed when he realised that the message of individual photographs had been subordinated to certain general aesthetic and ideological assumptions. The photographs selected by Steichen served as auxiliaries to an idea; their status as autonomous presentations had been removed. With a nod to Roland Barthes’ categories, it could be said that the punctum, that which is individual, had been almost wholly covered by the studium, namely – in this case – the leitmotif: the unity of the human race, in which Steichen believed, and which via photography he wanted to show the whole world. Wirpsza decided to go to poetic war with the exhibition organisers, presenting a radical critique of their way of thinking and looking at humanity in his poetry. He created one of the most fascinating books of poems of the twentieth century, which was ignored in Poland for years because readers did not understand its message, so ahead of its time was it. It seems that only now can we effectively talk about Wirpsza and his comments on the photographs.