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The exhibit on the walls for one more week at the Joseloff Gallery in West Hartford is called “Paper Movies.” The items in the show, 111 books, depict their stories not in words, but in pictures, like movies-in-a-book. Some of those “movies” are straightforward — like a tale of a 1958 murder investigation in Japan — but most are mysterious, stream-of-consciousness images that illustrate a mood just as much as a story.

The most heart-tugging story is told by Mike Brodie’s “Period of Juvenile Prosperity,” a large-format collection of color photos of youths living in squalor. “In This Dark Wood,” by Elisabeth Tonnard, is a series of black-and-white photos of lone people walking down the street at night, to illustrate Tonnard’s theme of “uniqueness is not unique, but a ripple in a sea of similarity.”

Shot over 20 years, “Imperial Courts,” by Dana Lixenberg, tells a story of life in a Watts apartment complex through the faces of its tenants, some photographed as children and later as adults. “For Every Minute You Are Angry, You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness,” by Julian Germain, tells of the day-to-day life of an old man. Another day-to-day chronicle is “Rich and Poor,” by Jim Goldberg, who photographed residents of a run-down hotel, who all tell about themselves. Joel Sternfeld’s “On This Site” shows places where historical occurrences happened, such as the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Stonewall riots and the store where black teen Emmett Till talked to the white woman whose husband later killed him.

Not all of the stories told are grim. “Animals that Saw Me,” by the show’s co-curator, Ed Panar, is a delightful collection of photographs of animals looking at the person taking the picture: a squirrel, a sheep in a field, a cow in a pen, a cat on a fence, a dog in a window. (The other curator is Melissa Catanese who, with Panar, is a 2016 Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the Hartford Art School.)

“Defective Carrots,” by Tim Smyth, shows various permutations of imperfect vegetables. Yoshinori Mizutani’s “Tokyo Parrots” shows birds at rest and in flight. The most mysterious is “Hotel Oracle,” by Jason Fulford, whose seemingly disconnected series of images are accompanied by random philosophical and mythological musings, like “I’d love to see a cyclops get a hole-in-one.”

PAPER MOVIES will be at the Joseloff Gallery on the campus of University of Hartford, 200 Bloomfield Ave. in West Hartford, until Feb. 17. joseloffgallery.org.