Witnesses to a chaotic world

Seeing may or may not be believing. Always, whether we know it or not, seeing is asking. This principle of interrogative viewing underlies “Questions Without Answers: A Photographic Prism of World Events, 1985-2010 - Photographs by VII.’’ The exhibition consists of 125 photographs, both color and black and white, by 16 photographers connected to the well-known photo agency. The show runs at the Tufts University Art Gallery through April 4.

Among events the photographs show are the fall of the Berlin Wall, war in the former Yugloslavia, the Rwandan genocide, fighting in Chechnya, 9/11, the Iraq war, famine in Darfur, the 2004 Asian tsunami, and the war in Afghanistan. There are also images of conflict and disaster more broadly construed, such as environmental depredation and endemic poverty.

The show has been organized with considerable thought. The images are divided into four thematic groups: Endless War, Never Again, Displays of Power, and Lives in the Balance. Useful notebook-size guides are available, with each page reproducing one of the photographs along with explanatory information about it. There’s also an extensive audio component, accessible on viewers’ cellphones, with commentary from members of VII and individuals affiliated with Tufts’s Institute for Global Leadership. The exhibition honors the institute’s 25th anniversary.

The commentary can leave something to be desired. Hurricane Katrina took place in 2005, not 2006. Statements like “the rolling thunder of blowback is muted’’ and “On these walls the aphorisms of war fail to shroud its wounds’’ don’t exactly add much. The general tone demonstrates a sad axiom: The shortest distance between good intentions and inaction is moral superiority.

The images are what matter. They’re unframed and hung at varied heights. The resulting sense of visual jumble is intentional. The justification, and it’s a logical one, is that onlookers’ experience of such dire events is chaotic and overwhelming. So the wall space is meant to echo how a spectator might feel in the real-life situations shown in the photographs.