People who view the latest Art on the Move exhibitions will likely come away with a dose of reality and cultural awareness.

Art on the Move, a program sponsored by the HUB-Robeson Galleries, displays art in places around campus. Abram Eric Landes' (Never) Forget, a collection of photographs of Rwandan orphans, will be featured in Waring Commons in West Halls through Dec. 7.

Landes, Class of 2005, was inspired to travel to Rwanda during spring break of his senior year in college. Those 11 days spent in Rwanda produced this collection of photographs and lifelong memories.

"I think about Rwanda every day," Landes said. "It's become a part of me. I've been trying to get back, but if anything, I want to go with a purpose, and a purpose hasn't presented itself. You can't just go to look. You go to help and to listen."

The 12 children featured in the exhibition were street orphans taken into an orphanage that Landes visited.

Landes said the orphanage caused an issue for some of the children, since they had to learn how to abandon the "certain fate" of dying on streets from malnutrition or AIDS. With the help of the orphanage, they have the opportunity to become educated and hopefully adjust comfortably in society, he said.

"A few of the kids end up leaving because they can't learn how to trust," he said. "They just don't know how to be in a stable home, so they feel uncomfortable and return to the street. That's a really sad reality."

The photographs served as Landes' thesis for the Schreyer Honors College. While developing the project, he received guidance from Charles Garoian, director of the School of Visual Arts and a professor of art education. This guidance specifically concerned the correct way to integrate his photography into the daily lives of the Rwandans.

"I remember having conversations about him about going into a culture with a camera and not distancing himself with the camera," Garoian said. "The tendency is to objectify people and treat them like objects. As a result of objectifying, all you've got is an image in a frame."

Garoian noted Landes' concern for greater humanity as one of his best qualities as a photographer.

"The most powerful photographers are those who can go and immerse themselves in the culture like an anthropologist," Garoian said. "They have a degree of humility about them so that the people that are depicted are not portrayed as if they were some kind of exotic spectacle."

Exhibitions like Landes' are also important to the Penn State community to avoid ignorance, Garoian said.

"If all you do is go to school and your education is insular, if you're only thinking in a box, then in a sense you can't be a citizen of the world," he said. "You're not educated fully to see that your experience is as important as another person's experience."

Landes added all people have the responsibility to start conversations about important issues, like the problems in Rwanda.

"These people that are across the ocean are people as well," he said. "They are valuable and should be treated as such."