The Contexts & Communities art exhibition, open at SP/N from Jan. 26 to March 2, includes a large archive of photographs that create a nostalgic feeling in viewers by centering themes of community and familial bonds.

The exhibition features photographs from the Comer Collection, which was created by retired engineer Jerry Comer. Curator and PhD student Rebecca Cai picked the exhibition’s current theme — Contexts & Communities — and selected all relevant photographs from the collection. Cai included text descriptions next to each piece of artwork to tell its story and show its place in the exhibition.

Comer gave his collection to UTD in 2010, giving an opportunity each year for PhD students to curate an exhibition by selecting a subset of its photos based on a central theme. As a serious amateur photographer who has won eight Best in Show awards from the State Fair of Texas and the city of Richardson, Comer said he acquires photographs mainly through the photography auctions held at Heritage Auctions.

“I’ve been collecting photos for a long time,” Comer said. “I had some that were quite valuable that were just under a bed, and it concerned me that when we will be away from the house on vacation or something, that if there was a fire, they’d be destroyed. So I gave them to UTD.”

Having to choose from many photos in the Comer Collection, Cai said she was interested in the idea of communities, as they depict a wide range of subjects. The exhibition contains photos of social networks including families and neighborhoods and focuses on the importance of human connection.

“Context and communities can mean different things,” Cai said. “[Internal contexts] can mean [how] the photo is cropped so some have a wider frame, so it may have a different effect [on the audience]. External context [such as] captions or labels are being used to talk about these people [in the photos], and how all these things are kind of connected.”

Cai brought out the importance of these social connections in the exhibit by placing together photographers who knew each other in real life. For example, photographer Dorothea Lange is placed next to Marion Post Wolcott, both of whom were a part of the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, an agency founded during the Great Depression to document and alleviate rural poverty in the U.S. Other artists groupings center around members of the Photo League — a New York co-op that documents social causes — as well as the Magnum Photographers — an international co-op founded in the 1940s.

The main image in the exhibition is a photograph by Bill McDowell, who is also a part of FSA, called “Diptych.” Cai said this image is the starting point for the exhibition since the story behind the picture is a recontextualization of photographic meaning. According to the Context & Communities pamphlet, FSA’s goal was to promote the New Deal and help communities displaced in the Dust Bowl. “Diptych” consists of two photographs placed side by side: Mr. Tronson, Farmer Near Wheelock ND from Russel Lee in 1936 and Detail of Untitled, Alabama from Walker Evans in 1936. Both photographs have black holes punched in them, as the FSA director deliberately damaged 100,000 out of the 270,000 negatives in an attempt to keep them from being published.

The hole-punched pictures have been recontextualized and now represent a new meaning through their new display. According to the Context & Communities pamphlet, “the black holes can be perceived as an abstraction and re-imagined to be circular portals that connect the view to post-Depression America.” Gallery Manager Brian Scott said that his personal favorite picture in the exhibition is “Diptych.”

“[Diptych] is a collaboration over time,” Scott said. “The photographer went out and took these pictures, the editor hated them, punched a hole through them and a person who printed these did this [and] those are three different points in time, not related to each other, where this piece was built. It’s also like evolution in your life. These things change over time. They’re affected by other things, but it’s not a conscious effect.”

The photograph “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange explores the theme of home, showing a displaced mother who has worked hard to support her children despite being burdened by the struggles of everyday life. According to Cai, this photo shows how photography has been used to garner public support through government aid programs by depicting conditions of poverty.

“I was hoping that the [audience] would walk away with the feeling that they were able to find some photos they were able to connect with,” Cai said. “I was [also] hoping the text portions [in the exhibition] provided an educational component where they were able to see the beginning of photography and hopefully, they will get a sense that photographers are working in dangerous situations and the shift between the past and contemporary photography.”

Composition in landscape photography is an essential aspect of the craft. Many rules talk about leading lines, the rule of thirds, visual weight, and more. These rules are good guidelines, but the art of simplification is at the root of good compositions.

It is easy to talk about the technical aspects of landscape photography. From a firm grasp of how your camera works and the exposure triangle to more advanced techniques like focus stacking, exposure bracketing, or even the gear we use, those topics are relatively binary and procedural.

As we master these key concepts, the importance of strong composition becomes more evident. We know how to get a good exposure, we understand how to maximize the depth of field appropriate for the scene, but there is still something missing from our images. This often comes down to weak versus strong compositions as what makes or breaks an image.

Rules of Composition

There are many rules and guidelines for composition, most readily found once a photographer starts reading more about composition or scouring the internet for tutorials. These rules include ones like the rule of thirds, visual weight in the scene, framing the scene with elements in the landscape, or leading lines, to name a few. These all offer components of composition and are important, but it doesn’t take long to realize that simply applying these core rules can still leave something to be desired in your images.

For example, the rule of thirds is a prevalent rule and one that even gets the grid lines on our phone cameras to help aid in composition. The rule of thirds is a good guideline for composition, but in and of itself, it doesn’t necessarily make your photograph strong just because you follow it.

How often have you lined up your subject, maybe a rock prominence or a horizon just where it is supposed to be, but the image is still lacking? I have many of those images in my catalog, where I’ve lined things up using the rule of thirds or combined some leading lines, and watched the weight of the image and still not walked away with a portfolio photograph.

That’s because while the rules are an initial step towards a strong composition, they are missing an underlying rule that I think gets overlooked. “Overlooked” might not be the right word, maybe more that many of the rules of composition need to be paired with the underlying foundation of simplification.

Simplification

Simplification is the underlying composition element that will help strengthen your landscape photography images. It works in tandem with the commonly understood rules of composition to add that visual strength to your photographs to help them stand out.

What exactly does simplification of a photograph mean? It helps direct the viewer’s attention, it helps eliminate distractions from the image, and, as a result, makes the subject of your image stand out to the viewer. This reduces confusion for the viewer and leads to a more significant visual impact than just following the basic rules of composition.

The more important question is, how do you simplify a scene? My approach, which I am perpetually working on, is to figure out my main subject in the scene in front of me. What is drawing my attention and why? This is key; you must know your subject – both for simplifying and applying the general rules of composition.

From here, you start to work on your composition. Line things up in your viewfinder or live view to a point where the scene looks good to you, the starting point. Now, start to think even more about the composition. Take time to let your eyes look at the edges of the frame and start asking yourself if there are elements in the frame that distract you.

This could be objects awkwardly cut off at the edges of the frame, objects that aren’t contributing to the main subject that could be removed by zooming in some more, or even excessively bright areas of the scenes that aren’t directly related to the main subject.

Analyze what you have in the frame, and no matter how big or small, ask yourself if it contributes to the main subject or distracts from it. If it is a distraction, think about how you can recompose to minimize it.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Once you understand how simplification works in tandem with the traditional rules of composition, you can put the practice into composing your images moving forward. For me, composition is something I am always working to improve and part of why I find the hobby of landscape photography so engaging!

People of the Blue Water. People of the Tall Pines. People of the Four Sacred Mountains. These are the names of three Native American tribal nations, translated into English. You might be more familiar with other names: Havasupai, Hualapai, Navajo (or Diné).

But as photographer Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) discovered over a 12-plus-year journey photographing approximately 400 of the tribal nations of the United States, there is no separating Native American identity from the land itself. Wilbur’s ongoing photo series, Project 562 (a reference to the 562 federally recognized tribal nations in the country at the time), forms the basis of a fascinating new photo exhibition, Natural Wanderment: Stewardship. Sovereignty. Sacredness, on view at the 808 Gallery through March 8.

“We are our homelands,” Wilbur says in the foreword to her New York Times best-selling book, Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America (Ten Speed, 2023), which chronicles her ambitious project. “There is no separation. And what is done to Mother Earth, is done to us.”

By 2023, Project 562 had taken Wilbur 600,000 miles across all 50 states, traveling by RV from Alaska to Florida and everywhere in between. She interviewed and photographed hundreds of people and met thousands more. As she recounts in the foreword, she asked many of her subjects the same questions: “about sovereignty, blood quantum, overcoming racism, education, and what it means to be an Indian,” and the idea for Natural Wanderment came about when a large cross section of her responses veered toward the same notion.

“I realized that the better question is, what does it mean to be Tulalip or Swinomish or Warm Springs, and…those answers were more related to the original agreements of the land,” Wilbur said during a Q&A held by the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. “I started questioning…how do we maintain that land-based identity when, on many occasions, the land that we are from historically no longer resembles our original identity or our original agreement?”

In Natural Wanderment, Wilbur addresses that question through nearly 40 portraits of Native American individuals—a fraction of the total that make up Project 562—nearly all of them posed in front of breathtaking vistas: mountains, prairies, canyons, and lakes. In keeping with her thesis that the Native American experience is not monolithic, the photos included in the show reveal and celebrate the depth and breadth of Indigenous experience in North America. The land, the faces, the clothing, the rituals differ widely from the Miccosukee Nation of the Florida Everglades to the Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii, yet it’s the connection to the land—and the attempts by federal and local institutions to thwart that connection—that unites Wilbur’s subjects.

Among the portraits in the show is one of Starflower Montoya (Diegueño Barona and Taos Pueblo), who grew up in Southern California, but each year engages in a 12,000-year-old ritual pilgrimage to New Mexico’s Blue Lake, the most sacred site of the Taos Pueblo. It’s an act that in present times holds an even deeper layer of meaning, as the Taos Pueblo were denied sovereignty over the site for nearly 70 years, starting in 1906. The lake site was returned to the Taos Pueblo nation in 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed the Blue Lake Bill, the first successful piece of Native American land-back legislation.

Elsewhere in the exhibition is a portrait of Michael Frank (Miccosukee), a seer and guardian. “In his childhood in the Everglades, Frank’s family and community enjoyed plentiful fish and hunted for deer, bear, and alligator,” the accompanying caption reads. “Now widespread toxic mercury levels in the Everglades prevent the tribe from fishing, compromising this crucial aspect of the culture along with many others.” But Frank remains resolute.

“All our land is sacred…respect our sovereignty, respect our home, respect our tradition,” he says in the caption. “We know they will destroy our home if we walk and talk like the rest of the world.”

Natural Wanderment was brought to Boston University through a collaboration among Wilbur, the BU Arts Initiative, and BU Art Galleries. BUAG intern Bo Yeon Chon (GRS’26), who designed and arranged the exhibition in the 808 Gallery, was motivated to create a walk-through experience that was reminiscent of Wilbur’s own journey.

“It was an enlightening process to explore [Wilbur’s] project, and I had this enormous freedom to think about how to arrange the photographs,” Chon says. “I saw the relationship between the Native American people and the land, and how land informs identity, and I wanted to capture that in the display. I think it turned out kind of reminiscent of the road that Matika embarked on in her RV.”

Elana Harris (MET’23), BU Art Galleries interim managing director, hopes visitors will take from the exhibition a sense of permanence.

“Many of us grew up seeing portraits of [indigenous] people in the past, in history class. If you’re lucky you’ll read about indigenous land movements, but you never really hear about the present,” Harris says, “which is why these works are a reminder that everything is still very relevant and still very real.”

Wilbur is doing her own part to create a sense of permanence. While Natural Wanderment tours the country, its parent project, Project 562, is ongoing. Since its undertaking, 12 tribal nations have been added to the federal list, and moreover, there are “state-recognized Tribes, urban Indians, international Tribal communities, Tribes across the borders, and those whose status has been stifled, overlooked, or eradicated by Congress, which maintains plenary authority over our sovereignty and status,” she writes in her foreword.

“I might as well have called the work Project Forever, because as I found out, I could continue to visit with Tribal communities for the rest of my life and never meet them all.”

Natural Wanderment: Stewardship. Sovereignty. Sacredness. is on view at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, through March 8. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is free to the public.