The Hood on Campus

This year’s Hood interns occupy a unique position. Although they will not get to see the opening of the newly expanded building, they are still leaving their mark, thanks to a significant group curatorial project. Five interns—Gina Campanelli ’18,

Class of 1954 Intern; Marie-Therese Cummings ’18, Levinson Intern; Ashley Dotson ’18, Conroy Intern; Tess McGuiness ’18, Conroy Intern; and Kimberly Yu ’18, Homma Family Intern—are working together to curate the first Space for Dialogue exhibition on display when the Hood reopens. They were presented with a group of twenty-five photographs, acquired for the collection by Dartmouth students between 2002 and 2017 through the Hood’s Museum Collecting 101 program. On the surface, these works had nothing in common, and they were not purchased with any intention of being displayed together. The interns went through them carefully and selected thirteen for their exhibition, titled Consent: Complicating Agency in Photography.

Consent is a core issue in photography, and these student curators look at it from four different angles: consent in self-portraiture, consent between a photographer and single subject, consent when one is photographed in public, and consent in photographing global issues. Each section uses three or four examples of how consent operates within that theme.

The interns write: “In light of our current political climate and the issues around privacy, climate change, poverty, identity and social media, this exhibition hopes to jumpstart critical conversations. We hope these photographs—often intimate, sometimes perverse, but always thoughtful and intentional—reflect the diverse challenges presented by our increasingly globalized world.”