ORONO – It’s the faces that captivate visitors. As they rush up the ramps in the Maine Center for the Arts and wind through the Hudson Museum toward balcony seats, the glare of a toddler suddenly stops them. The grin of an American Indian woman, clad in a stunning red sari, greets them. Panting, they can see the third floor, the usher impatiently waiting to seat these almost late arrivals. Yet, again they are halted by the brown boy in the worn bluejeans two sizes too big for him.

The boy sits cross-legged on the hard-packed ground. In his sneakers, green army jacket and faded Adidas cap, he looks like he’s from the Southwest. Only the handmade instrument reminiscent of a banjo hints that he lives on the other side of the globe.

“Rhythms of Creation: A Family’s Impressions of Indigenous Peoples of the World” is the enthralling photo exhibit at the Hudson Museum through Jan. 6. The pictures were taken by Jack Baxter, his daughter, Connie Baxter Marlow, her husband, David O. Marlow, and their daughter Ali Baxter Marlow in far-flung corners of the world and close to home.

These three generations of Baxters, a family that has played a prominent role in Maine’s history and politics over the past 150 years, have been recording the way of life of indigenous people for many years. The exhibit first was shown at Bowdoin College in the summer of 1999. Earlier this year, it traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, and Cambridge, Mass.

The photos on display were taken in India, Nepal, northern Thailand, Morocco, Ecuador, China, New Guinea, Tibet, Mexico and the United States. Photographs of people from the Hopi and Wabanaki tribes hang alongside images of the Tarahumara, Huichol, Lacandon Maya and Chamulan Maya nations, indigenous to Mexico.

Baxter, 81, asks visitors to “see in them not just pretty pictures, but feel the mystery of how these different people in their different cultures live before and after the fleeting moment that I have captured for you.” While that sense of mystery is there, it’s the vibrant, lush colors that frame the faces of the people in these far-off places that are hypnotic.

Connie Baxter Marlow, 54, trained as a landscape photographer in the 1960s and ’70s. She assembled a series of “family photos,” many of which are displayed in large handmade albums throughout the exhibit. Some of these snapshots, enlarged and framed, hang on the walls of the museum among the works of her father and her daughter.

“My relationship with the people you will find in the lovely albums made by Mayan artisans is a familial one,” wrote Connie Baxter Marlow. “Bonds of trust are developing that are being built over time and through shared experiences. I believe that when we come together with the indigenous peoples of our land as equals, as family, and we each open our hearts and our minds to the other, the melding of our gifts will bring a perspective that is invisible at this time.”

Her photos tend to capture the culture of a people more than her father’s do. There is great warmth in her pictures of the women at work in the mountains of Mexico, the deserts of the Southwest and the forests of Maine. Yet in an odd way, despite the photographer’s intent, there is a distance between Connie Baxter Marlow and her subjects similar to the distance scientists put between themselves and those they study.

Ali Baxter Marlow, 21, was the first Westerner allowed into a remote region of western China as the assistant to explorer and photographer Richard Fisher. Her grandfather sent her off with a point-and-shoot camera that malfunctioned and overexposed most of her shots. The ones that survived, however, are delightful, in part because her tremendous sense of awe is ever present.

“There is a feeling that envelops someone when one first realizes one is seeing something that no Western eye has ever seen,” she wrote for the exhibit, “stepping on ground where no Western foot has ever stepped before, venturing into a place that is completely unknown to the Western world. … If anyone were to be giving these people their first impression of the Western world I would want it to be someone like me. Someone who loves and respects them so much and holds them in such high regard.”

She photographed many children who seem to have eagerly lined up to have their picture taken by this foreign girl. Some shyly peek at the camera, others stare boldly back at it. One smiles angelically, while another mischievously dares the photographer to capture her soul. Like her grandfather, Ali Baxter Marlow is adept at seeing what it is that binds all human beings on the planet to one another.

David O. Marlow, 54, is an architectural and commercial photographer. Included in this exhibit are pictures he took of a collection of American Indian art for the Aspen Art Museum. To encounter these objects, beautifully displayed, lit and shot in a studio, is jarring after being entranced by so many faces. The photos taken by his daughter, wife and father-in-law stir deep human emotions. David Marlow’s pictures appeal to the intellect.

“Rhythms of Creation” will be on view at the Hudson Museum in the Maine Center for the Arts through Jan. 6. Photographs and text from Connie Baxter Marlow’s book “Greatest Mountain: Katahdin’s Wilderness” will be displayed through Jan. 6 at Fogler Library.