Aperture – the foundation, the magazine, the gallery, the publisher – has spent the last 50 years promoting photography by educating the public about what its directors think most of value in the medium. Its first exhibition in its new Chelsea gallery, “Nazar: Photographs From the Arab World,” continues that mission by presenting works by 17 contemporary photographers from the Arab world.

“Nazar” means seeing, insight, reflection. The show is intended to introduce artists largely unknown here, to let us see how they view things in a part of the globe events require us to know more about. There is evidence here of great striving, of trying to master exogenous technologies and put them to local use, to turn currents from more cosmopolitan centers of art to the demands of personal need.

The picture used in the publicity for the show and on the cover of the book of the same title published jointly with Noorderlicht (the Dutch organization that first mounted the exhibition in the Netherlands last year) confounds whatever expectations its subtitle might lead us to anticipate. “Cherihan” (1976), by Van Leo, shows a girl of maybe 11 or 12, with thick black braids down to her waist, dark eyes under dark eyebrows, and pearl stud earrings – all plausibly Arab, although the name is not.

But she is posed as a cowboy. She has a toy pistol in her left hand and a holster on her belt. Her vest and bell-bottom corduroys have been hand-colored purple, her straw hat and print shirt chartreuse, and her cheeks given an unnatural pink blush. Her stance mimics a poster for some Western movie that must have been playing in Cairo 30 years ago. The studio backdrop is a solid green with no cultural implications.

Van Leo (1921-2000), a Turkish-born Armenian who changed his name from Leon Boyadjian, was an enormously successful portraitist in 1940s and 1950s Egypt. He turned his clientele of soldiers, performers, strippers, and intellectuals into the equivalent of Hollywood stars. The Egyptian revolution of 1952 ended British domination but also eventually deprived the flamboyant so ciety photographer of the international milieu in which he flourished. Leo burned his extensive collection of nudes, and withdrew into his studio.

Although the Egyptian-born Youssef Nabil (b. 1972) learned his trade in New York and Paris, his pictures are similar to those of Leo in their Hollywoodish romanticizing and in their use of hand coloring. “My Frida” (1996) is modeled after the Mexican painter; “Natacha Smokes Through a Water Pipe, Natacha Atlas, Cairo” (2000) is ripe with phallic innuendo; “Sweet Temptation” (1993) presents two women contemplating a relationship; and “What Have We Done Wrong?” (1993) portrays two introspective men on pink bedsheets.

Rawi Hage (b. 1964) photographs wealthy Lebanese families posed with their domestic staff to show that “the colonial elite has simply been replaced by a national elite.” His “Developing and Underdeveloped” (1998) pictures are also large-format type-C prints, and are more interesting than their didactic intention suggests. The Lebanese Greta Torossian (b. 1969) concentrates on buildings in Beirut. The large-format type-C prints in her “Real Visions” (1999) series show old buildings destroyed and new buildings being built in the aftermath of Lebanon’s violent civil war.

The small black and white silver gelatin prints in Hichem Driss’s 1999 series titled “A travers les cotes” (“Along the Coast”) were made with a pinhole camera, basically a black box with a tiny hole in one end. The rocks and beaches, waves and clouds shot by Mr. Driss (b. 1968), a Tunisian, have a surreal, almost mystic, look about them, like Ansel Adams with his camera slightly out of focus. My favorite single picture in “Nazar” was one of the untitled black-and-white prints from Randa Shaath’s series called “Under the Sky: Rooftops of Cairo” (2003). Ms. Shaath (b. 1963) looks down on a darkened city; to the left of her picture a solitary man sits on the brightly lit roof of a high-rise apartment building staring at a television set, an isolated individual in a city of millions absorbed in media.

It would probably be impossible for an exhibition of “Photographs From the Arab World” to avoid politics. Ahmed Jadallah (b. 1970), a Palestinian, considers it his mission “to have the world see the despair of the Palestinian people.” He is a very competent photojournalist who has worked for Reuters since 1992, during which time he has taken more than 10,000 pictures in Gaza. He gets close to the violence and has been wounded several times. There are pictures of the dead and dying, of fire and despair. The wall texts explain at great length that this mayhem is visited on the Palestinians by Israel, although there is no suggestion as to why Israel does this.

On a recent Thursday night, in a space on the other side of the wall from Mr. Jadallah’s pictures, Vicki Goldberg lectured to an Aperture audience about photojournalism over the last several decades. She discussed the problem of authenticity, citing W. Eu gene Smith’s picture of Albert Schweitzer, in which he inserted material from another negative. Ms. Goldberg also spoke of the al-Dura hoax, the pictures of a Palestinian boy “shot” by Israelis while cowering beside his father. The image inflamed the Arab world and won sympathy for the Palestinian cause, but it was faked.

The al-Dura hoax and other similar cases of staged tragedy make it difficult to know how Ahmed Jadallah’s pictures should be understood.

Until November 3 (547 W. 27th Street, fourth floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-505-5555).