ABSTRACT

This chapter helps foster a discourse through the new museum ethics, which critiques an overreliance on codes as a default response, encouraging instead a proactive approach in which values/principles and case studies are considered. It explores the ethical strategies that one particular institution has successfully employed to empower themselves to show images of young people expressing bodily awareness in ways that draw out the significance of the works and support the agency of children. Experimental in nature, the exhibition forms a testing ground that helps us to imagine how new curatorial approaches, which are ethically informed and inclusive, can reconcile artistic freedom with the collection, interpretation and display of photographs of children expressing a bodily awareness. The museum’s photography collection addresses childhood through mostly familiar, everyday scenes that depict the oft-difficult social landscape of which children are part, touching on economic inequality, race, migration, adolescence and representations of the body.