Homer Alaska - Arts -

Williams looks at those relationships in "Native Ways in Changing Times," an exhibit of about 33 black-and-white photographs opening Friday at the Pratt Museum. Williams does a short artist's talk at an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. Friday.

For the past five years and under grants from the Alaska Humanities Forum, Williams has been visiting Port Graham and Nanwalek, photographing the lives of the Suqpiaq Alutiiq people of the two villages on lower Cook Inlet south of Kachemak Bay, particularly in relation to harvesting marine resources.

"I wanted to personally understand from the Native perspective what their feelings were, what their thoughts were around it," she said.

The project's impetus came from a conversation with Pat Norman, chief of the Port Graham tribe.

"I think it was very serendipitous," Williams said. "He said he had a cultural center with nothing on the walls."

Williams is making copies of the Nanwalek and Port Graham sections of her exhibit to give back to the communities.

She first started out looking at the importance of subsistence fishing to Natives an inadequate term, Williams discovered.

"One thing I did learn from many of the elders is they don't even like the word 'subsistence,' because it doesn't incorporate all the aspects of fishing," she said.

"'We just call it 'Native ways,'" Williams said one elder told her. "That's why it's the title of my show."

Williams has a bachelor of arts in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and a master of arts in social documentation from Sonoma State University, California.

She sees her photography as visual anthropology, using images as ethnography the way others might use text.

"I'm trying to capture images that you would 'read' as a person would read as written ethnography," Williams said. "There are things in a photograph that cannot be captured in a written ethnography, like a facial gesture."

Like other art forms, how someone views photography depends on a person's cultural, ethnic and personal perspective. That's something Williams said she hopes people will get from her exhibit: to see an image not just from their own perspective, but from other perspectives.

"Each of us looks at an image and has a different interpretation of it because of our different experiences in life," she said. "My hope is people will come to understand themselves better as well as understand the subject I'm photographing better."

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.