Here the title refers to matters of home, identity, and migration. Each of the five photographers with work in the show — Muriel Hasbun, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Ileana Doble Hernandez, Alejandro Cartagena — is Hispanic. In a sensible curatorial decision, all wall texts are bilingual. Griffin director Crista Dix curated the show.

Muriel Hasbun is a Salvadoran immigrant. “Traces” includes 18 images from her “Pulse: New Cultural Registers” series. Although these works are photographic, they look like paintings: adjacent to Surrealism, spectral and often slightly eerie, hovering between abstraction and representation. Is that the outline of a whale there? A set of torsos here? A sleeping, or dead, body? The works are all the more striking for being subdued, even recessive, in appearance.

“Pulse” takes its title from the fact that the images incorporate lines from seismic readings from El Salvador, documenting earthquakes and volcanic activity. Symbolically, the lines connect Hasbun (and the viewer) to Hasbun’s homeland. Practically, they’re a distinctive visual element, harkening to grids, schematics, and, yes, barbed wire.

Hasbun also has a video in “Traces,” describing a final visit to her dying father and how they made paper boats together. She invites museumgoers to make their own (materials are provided). Spread across the floor is a colorful and charming array of boats made by viewers of previous exhibitions of the video. Boats made by Griffin visitors will be added over the run of “Traces.”

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. That fact is pertinent because he has a pair of videos in here, showing the Paso del Norte International Bridge, between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. One is a live stream from the bridge’s walkway, the other a loop of excerpts culled from the stream. Both are, in effect, surveillance footage. The experience of watching is at once hypnotic and unsettling.

Of the five artists’ work, this is the simplest visually. It’s hardly simple otherwise, touching as it does— presenting as it does — immigration, deportation, and inequality. Morales notes that the bridge cameras belong to the same network as the El Paso Zoo’s. He does not belabor the point, leaving it to museumgoers to draw their own conclusions.

Born in Chile, Rodrigo Valenzuela lives in Los Angeles. The six examples from his “New Land” series are large-scale desert scenes. On those scenes, he superimposes lines, planes, and structures. His work recalls that of John Pfahl, in its juxtaposition of landscape with human artifice. Emptiness becomes a kind of ghost settlement. The dry, dun landscape becomes an extension of geometry — or perhaps the other way around. The work takes on a further dimension, insofar as this is terrain associated with the attempted border crossings of undocumented immigrants and a history of violence going back to the Spanish Conquest.

Valenzuela is the Griffin’s first Cummings Fellow. His duties include working with students at Winchester High School, which is a short walk from the museum and has a vigorous tradition of student photography.

A self-described “artivist,” Ileana Doble Hernandez was born in Mexico and currently lives in Boston. She has work from two series in the show. “Los Gringos” consists of 14 color diptychs of Los Angeles street life. They frequently contain text (signs, banners). There are five lightbox transparences from the other series, “Pollage” (a mash-up of “politics” and “collage”). Where the diptychs are lively, the transparencies go beyond that, with their frenetic content and garish appearance.

Alejandro Cartagena was born in the Dominican Republic and lives in Mexico. He repurposes vintage vernacular photographs in two ways. With the larger group in “Traces,” he removes the sitters’ faces, a commentary on identity, absence, presence, and disappearance (a word with a grim and weighty history in Latin America). One such distressed picture would look bizarre. A dozen would make a telling point. There are many dozens here, which rather dulls that point.

The other group consists of three arrangements of vintage black-and-white studio portraits of unidentified people. The portraits are various shapes and sizes, with several dozen within each frame. The idea is to convey “erasure through multiplicity.”

That sure sounds like echo-chamber artspeak. For at least this viewer, there’s an echo of Walker Evans’s 1936 “Penny Picture Display.” That photograph shows a sign for a Georgia photo studio, consisting of 225 thumbnail-size portraits. “I look at it,” Evans said, “and think, and think, and think about all those people.” Sometimes art manages to join with democracy, making traces of existence that enlighten, extend, and maybe even endure.

On April 20, an opening reception will be held at the museum from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.

TRACES OF EXISTENCE

At Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, through June 9. 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org

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