The Hood's Alumni Shows

Visitors to the Hood Museum this summer were rewarded in many ways, but perhaps most notably by the three exhibits the Hood mounted of Dartmouth alumni artists, each quite different from the others. The striking pastels and oils by Thomas George '40 were discussed in our Summer issue. The other two shows are the Vietnam War photographs of Dick Durrance II '65 (August 25 through October 21), and the graphic arts, calligraphy, and design work of the late* Stephen Harvard '70 (July 14 through September 16).

An art major at the College, Durrance was also a class president, president of Green Key and C&G, and captain of the ski team. As a senior he won recognition for his photo essay of a canoe trip down the Danube that appeared in National Geographic. By 1967 he was an army photographer in Vietnam, capturing dramatic photos that won many awards from his peers. He joined the National Geographic staff, working on stories on most continents. In 1972 he was named White House News Photographers Association Photographer of the Year. He turned to corporate and advertising photography in 1976 and in 1987 became Advertising Photographer of the Year. Two years ago he came across a box of his photographs and negatives stored away since Vietnam. He showed them to the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has published 101 of them in Where War Lives: A Photographic Journal of Vietnam, with a foreword by Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July. The Hood exhibit is based on the book. A poignant highlight: Durrance's well-known shot of a pair of army boots in a bunker.

"The Work of Stephen Harvard: A Life in Letters" is a fascinating retrospective showing the remarkable range of Harvard's talent book and poster designs, calligraphy and typography, illustration and printing, and stone cuttings. An undergraduate inspired by the late Professor Ray Nash, after graduation Harvard worked for 15 years with Roderick Stinehour '50, founder of the Stinehour Press, designing books, creating digital type faces, and becoming a vice president of the firm. (The "V" at the beginning of this article is from a Stephen Harvard font.) Unfortunately, Harvard died two years ago while hiking alone in the White Mountains. But the source of his inspiration, Nash's old graphic arts workshop in the BakerSanborn corridor, has been reopened tinder Stinehour's direction.