Behind glass-paneled cabinets set along a hallway inside CUNY’s Graduate Center in Manhattan, the faces of young and old Iraqi citizens killed by American troops peer out.

The displays, an art project devised by students in a Ph.D. photography seminar class at the Graduate Center in Midtown, resemble blown-up versions of the “Portraits of Grief” vignettes that the New York Times published in the days after the September 11, 2001, attacks to memorialize and personalize the thousands of victims. In this version, the killer isn’t Al Qaeda suicide terrorists but America itself.

“The project is about our complicity,” said the class’s professor, Geoffrey Batchen, a professor in art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY’s doctoral granting institution. “The people who made the exhibition decided rather than show more atrocity pictures, they would try to deal with the question of the atrocity itself.”

The posters contain a snapshot portrait of an Iraqi civilian, accompanied by a brief textual sketch of the person’s life and a description of the person’s violent death at the hands of American soldiers.

In one display, Ali Rekaad, a boy with close-cropped hair and a bucktoothed smile is described as a “future football star.” He was “killed, along with his mother, father, sisters, and two young brothers, by an American helicopter gunship that bombed their tent in Makr al-Deeb Province at 2:45 a.m. on May 19, 2004,” the poster says.

Another poster shows a picture of an infant, Rowand Suleiman. “The birth of Rowand Suleiman was a joyful event for Mohammed Suleiman, an engineer living in Baghdad, and his wife. The baby was killed, the poster says, by an “American cluster bomb” found by her brother while playing outside their home.

Khalid Ali Saleh, “a gentle soldier,” is described as a retired Iraqi colonel, who liked showing his grandchildren “the garden of fragrant herbs he had been cultivating in his spare time.” He was “killed by an American tank round on April 7, 2003, while being driven to his home in Baghdad. A second round of fire from the 20-MM tank gun set the car ablaze, incinerating Mr. Saleh in front of the eyes of a relative who had managed to drag herself from the vehicle.”

Among the victims is a boy who “loved to look at stars” and a student, shot dead by American soldiers while “celebrating high-exam scores,” who was a “lover of music.”

None of the vignettes contain information about the context of the specific American military actions and none mentions the existence of Iraqi and foreign insurgents. The students in Mr. Batchen’s class wrote the biographical snippets using information they culled from anti-war Web sites, iraqvictims.com, iraqbodycount.org, and the Web site of the Guardian newspaper.

One portrait describes Mohammed Al-Izmerly as an “acclaimed chemist and scholar” who “decided to turn his daughter Nuha’s bedroom into a kind of family archive. The small room where he’d once kissed his daughter goodnight was now filled with pictures of Nuha and her sisters.” The poster says the chemist was killed “while in custody at a camp near Baghdad International Airport.”

The Associated Press reported in March that American investigators say Al-Izmerly was a leader of Iraq’s effort to develop chemical arms and was an assassination specialist who designed a “poison pen.” The Associated Press said that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command had begun an inquiry into his death.

The poster says that Al-Izmerly decorated his daughter’s bedroom with “childhood drawings and his own wedding photos.”

Mr. Batchen, whose course is called “The Photograph in the World,” said the exhibition deliberately included only portraits of Iraqis killed by Americans. “We’re in the United States,” he said. “Our military is undertaking these activities.” But he said the exhibition was not “explicitly an anti-war project.”

Students in his course designed the exhibit to coincide with a symposium that the Graduate Center is hosting this week called “Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis,” organized by several universities and museums.

The symposium intends to “explore the increasingly urgent questions provoked by photographs of atrocity in contemporary visual culture,” according to its Web site. Along the same hallway that contains “Portraits of Grief” is another project created by the class, which features enlarged questionnaires that people filled out about their reactions to the Abu Ghraib images of tortured Iraqi prisoners.

Kris Belden-Adams, a doctoral student in the photography seminar who helped put together the together the exhibit, said it is up to the viewer to determine whether to take a political message away from the project. “If people respond to those facts by questioning their thoughts on the war, that makes people think and that’s what we’ve seemed to do,” she said.

The president of the Graduate Center, William Kelly, said he found the exhibit to be a “complex” and “interesting” companion piece to the symposium. “If we see Iraqis as these anonymous tortured others, we still miss the fact that these are individuals in the same way as people who died in the attacks on September 11.” He said it wasn’t a critique of American foreign policy but a provocative examination of “ethics and aesthetics.”

Students who passed by the exhibit, located in a hallway on the first floor of the Graduate Center along the way to CUNY’s television studio, said they were moved by the portraits and thought it was an effective anti-war statement that would be most persuasive to people who are ambivalent about America’s occupation of Iraq.

One student, Sasha Artemova, 24, who moved to New York from Siberia just before the September 11 attacks, said it’s “very obvious” that the creators of the exhibit are “trying to turn people against the war. They are trying to act subtly. It’s more likely to reach people. It’s a subtle and smart way to do it.”