Eyes OF THE World : Santa Monica College students send 750 close-up photos to the Soviet Union as part of an ambitious peace project.

Brooding. Suspicious. Bored. Impish. Quizzical. The eyes have it.

All told, there are about 750 pairs of eyes photographed by Santa Monica College students as part of an ambitious--and mysterious--peace project based in the Soviet Union. The idea is that culling and displaying head shots of thousands, if not millions, of people around the globe will do for world peace what the AIDS Quilt has done for public awareness of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“Humanity is the one uniting thing,” photography instructor Deirdre Garvey said of the collection of close-ups. “It’s a completely nonpolitical, nonpartisan thing.”

For the local college, it started with a simple two-page letter from the Russian city of Gorky, addressed to “Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, California, 90401.” The undated, typed letter arrived at the president’s office in November and wound its way to the graphic arts department and then to Garvey, who has organized photography students to do shoots for nonprofit groups.

The letter, signed by an Alexander Teplitsky, said, in part: “We are a group of young people from the Soviet Union who . . . appeal to you . . . to support with your deeds our grandiose idea” to assemble 1 billion photos of people “of all the countries of the world. . . .”

“People are looking into each other’s eyes through the machine gun” in Pakistan, Liberia, Palestine and other places, Teplitsky wrote. Saddam Hussein “didn’t think about his Arab brothers” and invaded Kuwait, and other countries jumped to Kuwait’s defense. “It is a chain reaction, the base of which is the neglect of the life of a concrete individual.”

Teplitsky said he was sending his request to universities and heads of state throughout the world. The goal is to come up with a Gargantuan photo exhibit called “Eyes of the Earth” that will tour the world and “will help people literally to look into each other’s eyes and to understand that the price of any person’s life is, at least, not less than one’s own.”

The letter, which contained no significant information regarding who Teplitsky was or the nature of his work, asked that the photos be sent to a post office box in Gorky. There was no other return address or phone number.

All the same, Garvey figured, it looked like a nice assignment for her students.

Then the Persian Gulf crisis escalated, and erupted into war--and the project had an infusion of energy. “Everyone was hot to trot,” said Garvey, who has protested the war at the Federal Building in Westwood and has a nephew stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “The idea that you could annihilate the human race was forefront on people’s minds.”

Maureen Cotter was one of the first to join, snapping photos at anti-war rallies of children, senior citizens, a stocky man sporting a Lenin pin on his beret, a nihilist donning a black hood.

“I’ve been on the front line of all protests--Vietnam, civil rights, the women’s movement, gay rights,” said Cotter, 48. She said she has often written to politicians and marched in demonstrations, but this was her first opportunity to use photography to voice her convictions. “This is my new tool, my new weapon,” she said.

The 35 contributors, most of them photography students, also combed through family albums, through negatives for student ID cards and publicity photos taken for college plays. Their time was volunteered. Ilford Corp., a manufacturer of photo supplies, donated printing paper, and local photographers donated film.

The result is a human panorama: a grinning Mickey Mouse, hugging a child. A boy taunting, sticking out his tongue. A 50-ish woman with ‘50s-ish white-rim sunglasses, carrying a sign that protests the Soviet government’s crackdown on Lithuania. An American Indian toddler in feather headdress. Studio-perfect graduation photos of smiling men in suits. Babies. A skull. Koreans, Mexicans, African-Americans, Scandinavians.

“It really looks like a little microcosm of the world, all by itself,” Garvey said as she surveyed the 5-by-7-inch prints stretched across the studio floor of the photography department.

“Look at all these faces. You decide which of these to exterminate, on an environmental or political level. Obviously, you can’t pick,” she said. But, she added with a wry smile, “It would only take one Scud to wipe out all these people.”

The project has already achieved its desired effect on the photographers. Bryan McLellan, 37, called it “an inspiration--a reminder that other people fighting the war are people.” He contributed portraits from a recent filming trip to Turkey of a wrinkled-faced carpet maker in a rural village and an Istanbul vendor in his 30s who hawked framed photos of Marilyn Monroe.

For Cotter, the project points to “the total uniqueness of each human being. You can run your car into a wall and go out and buy another. You can’t duplicate a human being.”

And thus the students are not concerned that they don’t know Alexander Teplitsky from Joe Blow, or that the Moscow-based National Assn. of Art Photographers of the Soviet Union, photography associations in Lithuania and other parts of the country and the Soviet Embassy in Washington know nothing of “Eyes of the Earth” or the man. Perhaps he is “not a specialist in photography,” but someone who “has a good idea and didn’t send the information to professional (photography) centers,” suggested Laima Skeiviene, president of the National Assn. of Lithuanian Photographers, in a telephone interview from Vilnius.

A telephone survey of other colleges and universities in Southern California turned up no other recipients of Teplitsky’s letter.

“Who cares?” said Garvey, who on Monday sent boxes containing the 750 photos to the post office box in Gorky. “If (the photos come) back here, we’ll do it. . . . It’s a good enough idea to keep alive,” she said.

Cynicism, she said, would quash such a project before it even has a chance. “It’s not like we’re investing in the stock market. We’re investing in humanity. . . . If you worry too much about that kind of stuff, you don’t do anything.”

Garvey said she is continuing to collect pictures and will ship additional batches as they roll in.

“We are responding to him on faith,” acknowledged college spokesman Bruce Smith, “but I can’t imagine that someone would have some sort of scam of having pictures of people.

“It may be a sort of pie-in-the-sky project. (Teplitsky) certainly has lofty goals,” Smith said.

Neither are the photographers concerned about reaping any personal glory. “Just contributing to the whole idea, that’s what I like about it,” said Maja Engel, 35, a native of Germany. “It’s like a Lego set” that builds piece by piece, she said. “I don’t think it’s at all important who shot the pictures, who it is (in the photographs),” she said.

“I like the idea to exchange pictures--kind of like trading peace.”

But there is still the mystery of how the letter got to Santa Monica College. Garvey guesses that Teplitsky flipped through a directory of colleges. Or perhaps he saw in his country the traveling exhibit of “Photographs From Santa Monica College.”

The college, Garvey explained, has an “artistic Ping-Pong” relationship with the 22-year-old National Assn. of Lithuanian Photographers, the Soviet Union’s premiere photography institute. The connection was started by Santa Monica College art instructor Steven Anaya, who taught at universities in Lithuania and is teaching in Vilnius now, and it has led to exchange visits and exhibits. On a trip in 1989, Garvey and three other Santa Monica professors launched a show of their works, which is still touring the Soviet Union--and may be the key to the Teplitsky riddle.

Garvey and the other participants hope “Eyes of the Earth” will be the latest in a line of art projects with a broad social message. “Look at the impact the AIDS Quilt project made--and those were pieces of art,” said Cotter of the quilt whose panels were made by friends and relatives of people who had died of AIDS. When unveiled in its entirety in 1989, its 10,000 panels covered all 14 acres of the Washington Ellipse, and it is still growing. “There are very few people who haven’t heard of it,” she said.

Garvey said that she is “so trained to think of photographs as individual entities,” and to scrutinize them for their technical and artistic qualities, that she was surprised by her own emotional response to the layout. “I can look at that sea of photographs and think how many of those (people) will go off to war in the next year, “ she said.

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