At first glance, the photograph at Rockport’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art seems cute. Dozens of babies stare at the camera, some in highchairs, some crawling on the ground. It looks like they’re at day care, corralled in a play area.

Then you see the caption, which explains the jarring truth. These babies are orphans, abandoned or delivered by parents unable to care for them. This isn’t day care. It’s the Foundation for Child Welfare in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And this is their home.

In Sao Paulo, the mass exodus of peasants unable to make ends meet in the countryside has stretched resources to the limit. There aren’t enough jobs, the city is overcrowded and chaotic, and poverty is widespread. For some parents, an orphanage is the only option.

From 1993 to 1999, Brazilian-born photographer Sebastiao Salgado traveled to 40 countries to document people on the move, uprooted from their homes by fate – or choice – in search of a better life. Salgado’s images show not only where they’re going, but what they’ve left behind. The resulting exhibition, “Migrations: Humanity in Transition,” opened last week in six Maine galleries, and it already is garnering a strong response.

“People are realizing these are issues that are right here in our state as well as around the world,” Oliver Wilder, president and CEO of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, said Sunday, a day after the show opened there. “It raises our awareness of some of the struggles people have around the world to survive. It helps us to have compassion for these circumstances.”

The exhibit’s scope – it includes more than 310 photographs – made a statewide collaboration both desirable and necessary for museum organizers. Each venue focuses on a different geographic or thematic area. The Latin American photographs at CMCA tie in with the annual Camden Conference, whose theme this year is “Two Worlds Under Pressure: The Growing Crises of Population and Movement.” The University of Southern Maine Art Gallery in Gorham shares the Latin American photos, which depict mass migration from rural areas to cities. Wally Mason, director of the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, opted for a global theme because of the museum’s distance from the other venues.

The African photographs at Maine College of Art’s Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland are among the most dramatic and heart-wrenching in the show. The University of New England art gallery in Portland is showing “The Children,” a portrait-based offshoot of “Migrations.” And the Portland Museum of Art, which was the driving force behind the exhibit’s Maine appearance, focuses on Asia’s “new urban face.”

“Shifting populations have a great deal to do with the way in which we live,” said Susan Danly, the curator for works on paper at the Portland Museum of Art. “It’s something relevant particularly here in Maine, but … one of the things we have to realize is that we are not immune to the experience of these migrants.”

Though the images depict struggle and hope worldwide, they touch on issues close to home. In Lewiston, the recent influx of Somali immigrants has come with both growing pains and a call for tolerance within the community. In recent years, hundreds of Honduran and Mexican blueberry workers have chosen to call Washington County home, often bringing their families with them. The accident in the Allagash that killed 14 Central American workers last September turned a tragic spotlight on migrant populations that often go unnoticed in Maine.

“What kinds of sacrifices do people make when they leave their homes and try to earn their bread and butter for their families back home?” Wilder asked. “You look at the photos and it’s easy to think these are issues [that are far away]. Then you think, ‘This is happening in Lewiston,’ and you realize this is going on right in our back yard.”

In many ways, the exhibit parallels Salgado’s own migrations. He was born in 1944 on a farm in Brazil, and through his childhood his family moved to progressively larger towns. As an adult, he moved to Sao Paulo with his wife, Leila Wanick Salgado, to study economics. In 1969, with Brazil under military rule, the couple left for Paris, where they still live.

Though trained as an economist, Salgado became enchanted with photography in Paris and in 1973 decided to work as a full-time photographer. In the years that followed, he traveled the world to document the plight of the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa, as well as the end of large-scale manual labor in “Workers,” from which “Migrations” grew.

“You don’t set out to do something, you set out to look and see and make things, and a subtext starts to emerge,” explained Mason, the UM museum director who is also a photographer.

While making pictures for this project, first published in book form by the Aperture Foundation, Salgado found that the shift to mechanization took workers out of the fields and into the cities to find work in droves. This rural exodus, Salgado argues, is changing the world irrevocably.

“People have always migrated, but something different is happening now,” Salgado wrote in a 2001 article for Designer/builder: A Journal of the Human Environment. “For me, this worldwide population upheaval represents a change of historic significance. … We have become one world: in distant corners of the globe, people are being displaced for essentially the same reasons.”

Salgado shows the human side of this displacement. In one chilling photograph at the University of Maine Museum of Art, two women stare vacantly at his camera, each clutching photographs of men – though it is unclear whether they are brothers, husbands or fathers. The caption reads, “In July 1983, Iraqi soldiers took away all the men from several villages. They were never seen again. The families still wait for their return. Beharke, Iraqi Kurdistan, 1997.”

“Migration usually implies something that is desperate,” Mason said. “Migration here has a much more emotive and human-condition point of view.”

His most powerful images are beautiful and disturbing. They show sweeping cityscapes, lost children, chaotic barrios, farmers working against a backdrop of skyscrapers. They cause the viewer to take a second look, and the captions often are startling.

“People have been struck by the very interesting combination of often a beautiful image with a very disturbing tale being told,” Wilder said. “You’re attracted to the image and then sometimes shocked or simply surprised by what’s really going on there.”

What’s going on is a massive transition, Salgado has written, which has global effects. The widening disparity between the rich and the poor is something that touches everyone. So is the exodus from the countryside into the world’s big cities. To Salgado, the phenomenon of migration is something that shouldn’t be ignored, so he confronts the viewer with images of its effects that can’t be ignored, and won’t soon be forgotten.

Venues for “Migrations: Humanity in Transition”

The exhibit will be on view through March 22 at the following locations.

. Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport: “Latin America: Rural Exodus, Urban Disorder,” in conjunction with the Camden Conference, Feb. 7-9, www.camdenconference.org

. University of Southern Maine Art Gallery, 37 College Ave., Gorham, 780-5008, “Latin America: Rural Exodus, Urban Disorder”

. Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland, 775-6148, “Asia: The World’s New Urban Face”

. Institute For Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, 522 Congress St., Portland, 879-5742, “The African Tragedy: A Continent Adrift”

. Art Gallery at University of New England, Westbrook College campus, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland, 797-7261, “The Children”

. University of Maine Museum of Art, Norumbega Hall, 40 Harlow St., Bangor, 561-3350, “Worldwide: Migrants and Refugees”