‘State of Our Union’ Photography Exhibit

The BPL present, as its subtitle signifies, connects previous and current. It’s the current that’s the main target of the 4 250th-inspired exhibitions the Griffin Museum of Photography is mounting this yr below the rubric “State of Our Union.” The first, “Manifest Destiny,” runs by means of March 15. So do two associated reveals, Austin Bryant’s “Where They Still Remain,” about Black and Indigenous websites on Martha’s Vineyard, and John Willis’s images from South Dakota of the Pine Ridge and Standing Rock reservations.

“Manifest destiny” was the Nineteenth-century principle that this nation was destined to develop westward, from sea to shining sea. America the gorgeous? America the continent spanning. Not surprisingly, the work of the six photographers in “Manifest Destiny” largely, although not totally, considerations the West. All of it considerations panorama — as geology, after all, but additionally historical past, politics, commerce.

What would be the single most hanging picture in a present that has many is Craig Easton’s view of Monument Valley as seen from the window of a present store. There you could have them, framed inside a body: geology, historical past, politics, and commerce — although possibly the final three are variations of the identical factor? All however certainly one of Easton’s images, that are in black-and-white, are from the West. The one which isn’t has a properly photographic resonance. It reveals the Kodak Tower, talking of historical past and commerce, in Rochester, N.Y.

A Scotsman, Easton is an outsider wanting in. Scott Conarroe, a Canadian, is a neighbor paying a go to. His good-looking coloration images vary in topic from a Miami monorail station to a Louisiana church. Conarroe’s photograph of a pedestrian walkway in Santa Monica, Calif., has the Pacific within the background. It makes for a startling distinction with a Lisa Elmaleh {photograph} that additionally has the Pacific within the background. Hers is of a Tijuana border fence, topped with barbed wire, extending throughout a stretch of seashore into the ocean. Elmaleh’s dozen black-and-white images variously relate to immigration. This one isn’t alone in calling to thoughts King Canute.

Elamaleh’s images are all from the US-Mexico border, either side. Drew Leventhal’s doc a unique border, the Mason-Dixon Line, dividing North and South, free and slave. The dozen black-and-white prints are of websites in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. That they’re photogravures, with that format’s tonal softness, lends them an elegiac high quality. That the subject material is so typically disorienting — an equestrian statue of Confederate common James Longstreet in Pennsylvania? — insures the elegies abjure nostalgia.

Victoria Sambunaris’s 4 images are huge (39 inches by 55 inches), in coloration, and return us to the West: Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Montana. In three of them, she reveals how mining has violated the land — but the surprise of the land’s majesty is how a lot magnificence, even magnificence, endures. The fourth, of a mountain move in jap Nevada, combines area, rock, and sky to point out that majesty far much less complicatedly.

Richard Frishman’s “Ghosts of Segregation” collection is a reminder that geography isn’t essentially a information to morality. It contains images of websites from the Confederacy, but additionally New York, Illinois, Missouri, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and New Jersey. It’s additionally a reminder that neither is look essentially a information to morality. His magic-hour view of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Ala., is as surpassingly stunning because the occasions there 60 years in the past, on Bloody Sunday, had been heinous.

Austin Bryant, who’s based mostly in Boston, has been going to the Vineyard since he was a toddler. A way of connection, even reverence, is clear in his dozen coloration images. People are seen in solely certainly one of them — a father and son seen from afar in a area — however the lives lived, then in addition to now, may be felt all through.

John Willis, who taught for a few years at Marlboro College, in Vermont, has been visiting reservations in South Dakota since 1992. The images are excitingly diversified: giant and small, in coloration and black-and-white, of individuals and the unrelenting High Plains area they reside in. Willis’s near-constant emphasis on the human aspect in that area makes it stand out all of the extra.

The one exception is {a photograph} of Mount Rushmore. Willis shot it from a distance and above (how did he rise up there?), putting the 4 carved faces very a lot inside a a lot bigger panorama. Seen that approach, they give the impression of being synthetic and grotesque, unhuman but additionally piddling to the purpose of silliness. President Trump has spoken of wanting his face being added to the group. If he noticed Willis’s {photograph}, he may assume in any other case. Or not.

On Jan. 24, Easton, Leventhal, Elmaleh, Frishman, and Sambunaris will take part in a panel discussion on the museum from 3 p.m.-4:30 p.m.

MANIFEST DESTINY

JOHN WILLIS

AUSTIN BRYANT: WHERE THEY STILL REMAIN

At Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, by means of March 15. 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org

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Mark Feeney may be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.