Ask people about their dreams -- meaning aspirations, not sleep-time adventures -- and you'll get answers as varied, fanciful and revealing as the individuals you approach.

Argentine photographer Martin Weber, who was born in Chile and lives in Brooklyn, has been doing so since he began his "A Map of Latin American Dreams" project in 1992, and the resultant images are arresting for their intimacy and narrative, and the connection they make with the viewer.

"To be a lawyer," says a spirited young acrobat contorting before a traveling carnival scenery panel in La Nina, Argentina. "I want to marry an American," a teen holding a stuffed animal says in La Habana, Cuba. "That they return the remains of my son Jose Luis Olivo Cardenas, victim of the paras [paramilitary]," says an unsmiling mother surrounded by her grandchildren in San Onofre, Colombia.

"My dream is to die," asserts a somber young man of Medellin, Colombia, his trunk bared to reveal multiple scars and burns.

The respondents stare out from black-and-white, documentary-style portraits at Silver Eye Center for Photography, South Side, where Weber is the Fellowship 2008 award recipient. The award includes a $5,000 cash prize as well as the exhibition.

Juror Ariel Shanberg, executive director of The Center for Photography at Woodstock, chose Weber from 299 submissions representing 35 states and two foreign countries.

The subjects of these photographs hold or otherwise pose with a small blackboard upon which they've written their dream, a device that could be distracting but in fact dissolves into the photographs' compositions, which are as complex as they are staged.

His sitters are middle class and poor, colonists and indigenous peoples, urban and rural. Each setting inspires questions; it is testimony to the power of the images -- and of the dreams -- that each leaves one wanting to know more of the dreamer's story.

The photographs, which Weber shoots with a 4-by-5-inch field camera and prints himself, are handsome works in their own right, their drama intentional. Each detail, hand gesture, pose, is chosen by the artist for effect, an efficiency of communication he learned through earlier experience in theater.

The dreams exist then in the space between real and fiction, between living and hoping. Frozen in a photographic frame, they linger as entities both inspirational and unattainable.

At first glance, the scenarios are foreign, but the words and desires eliminate cultural distance.

"I find that these photographs make you think twice about your first judgments," says Silver Eye communications manager and acting curator Amanda Bloomfield. "The idea of the dream is so universal."

A Brazilian teen wants "To have a lot of money." A Nicaraguan father says, "My wish is to see my sons prepared to face the problems of unemployment." Had one not been looking at the images, these could have been Pittsburghers speaking.

And if that blindfold test doesn't underscore humanitarian similarities, consider the following excerpt from a statement Weber wrote for a 2004 exhibition to plant his dreamers squarely in your backyard:

"Now is a crucial time to represent what is being left unattended: the evolution of another crisis in Latin America. The middle class is being pushed into poverty by rising unemployment, and campesinos are being forced again to migrate into the cities, moving from poverty into misery. The concentration of wealth is growing and the gap between the poor and the rich is being stretched. The conditions that create the pattern of cycles involving social fragmentation, political violence and instability are rising."

Four masked men in Chiapas, Mexico, look chillingly like the global terrorists routinely featured on the daily news, but their dream reads more like that of a community service agency in an American city: "In the municipality of San Pedro Pohlo there are 5333 displaced. They are suffering a lot. We want to obtain support, food, medicine."

Weber creates layered images that not only stare back but also require the viewer to learn a new language of interpretation. Barriers of language and political turmoil compromise understanding of residents of the southern half of our hemisphere. Weber presents one way to bypass those obstacles.

Ten honorable mention awardees also exhibit one image each. Three are from Pittsburgh -- Scott Goldsmith, Lori Hepner and Michael Nixon -- and the others are Jay Gould of Ruston, La.; Joseph O. Holmes, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Allison Hunter, Houston, Texas; Christopher Jordan, Troy, N.Y.; Sarah Stonefoot, Madison, Wis.; Cole Thompson, Laporte, Colo.; and Jennifer Williams, New York City.

The variety of work shown by the latter provides a good representation of the breadth of expression being pursued by contemporary photographers. Some will be featured in Silver Eye's New Works Gallery next year, so visitors will have opportunity to see a larger selection of their output.

Showing now in New Works are Chicagoan Paul Clark's black and white abstracted "Barriers" and Pittsburgh-based Karen Antonelli's large-format color prints from "Liminal," an "ongoing investigation of the city's marginal spaces."