This sounds like an unpromising subject for a photo exhibition, but in fact the Bernstein Gallery of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton is currently showing a deeply impressive set of images under the title of “Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape.” The photography was done by the Israeli-American photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik while on assignment for Newsweek magazine.

The exhibition is one of a series devoted to art that comments on public policy problems that the gallery curator, Kate Somers, and I (as chair of the faculty committee on the Gallery) arrange in a space adjacent to the School’s classrooms. The idea is that our students -- majoring in public policy -- should consider the ways that artists interpret the sorts of policy problems that the students are learning about in their coursework. The images are frequently upsetting -- we have mounted shows concerning child obesity, wartime violence, HIV-AIDS, and more -- and I have been gratified over the years to see the intensity with which they (and their accompanying texts) are discussed. Torgovnik’s photographs portray the children born of the crime of rape during the Rwandan genocide alongside their mothers. The images can be seen on his Web site, but they may lack the intensity of personal encounter with the large photographs, revealing in their subjects eyes something of the pain the mothers have endured and the corresponding uncertainty of their fatherless children. It would take William Blake to describe the images adequately.

I organized a panel to discuss the exhibition last week. Jonathan Torgovnik led off by explaining how he came to take the photographs, and how the experience had led him to establish a philanthropic fund (Foundation Rwanda) to help educate the children. He was followed by a Yeshiva University psychologist, Carl Auerbach, who studies social trauma, and has worked with these very individuals, and by Charli Carpenter, a leading young human rights scholar from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who works on children’s rights. There was some tension in the discussion between Torgovnik and Carpenter, who worried that the children might have been injured by the photographic project, although I think she was later impressed by learning about the careful manner in which the children were being assisted.

But for me, and I think for the audience, the panel was eloquent testimony to what we can learn (and not) from taking images seriously. Viewing the exhibition and attending the panel were significant learning experiences. These days we frequently use film and video in class as part of the course “readings,” but I think the Bernstein Gallery is an example of how we can stimulate learning as the “intended consequence” of displaying relevant art. I posted not long ago on the importance of campus museums, but I want also to call attention to the broader range of opportunities that universities have to use art environmentally to fully engage the consciousness of our students.