Is color fundamental to or a mere varnish on photography? Composition and subject-matter are fundamental to photography, but what about color? Kodak is going to retire the manufacture of its famous Kodachrome color film, which the company has made since 1935. In considering the current exhibition Jo Whaley: Theater of Insects at the Museum of Photographic Arts, questions arise concerning the appropriate role of color in photography.

Jo Whaley stages preserved entomological specimens, mainly Coleoptera (beetles) or Lepidoptera (butterflies) to make mostly Victorian style vignettes. Because the titles of her works consist of the Latin genus and species of the insect featured in a particular photograph, she lays claim to invoking science in her working methodology (perhaps so PETA won’t complain), but the scientific concept in this exhibit is the 19^th-century practice of amassing great quantities of specimens that have been killed and preserved for purposes of collecting. The exhibition reads like an encyclopedic collection of beetles and butterflies entitled with the dead language of Latin that were killed to be incorporated into visual lamentations—thus, in all probability, PETA should be upset with her.

Ms. Whaley’s photographs tenaciously follow the aesthetic strategy of juxtaposing design elements such as shape against shape and/or color against color. With her theater stagecraft background to draw upon, she creates extremely intricate backgrounds for her images. She then inserts a colorful bug or two into these scenes and then captures the scene on film. Her photographs do capture the saturated colors of the insects, which match or complement another part within the overall image. The saturated color often serves to camouflage a simple design composition. The finished product in such cases can be likened to a Christmas ornament—sparkly and colorful but little more than a decoration. More often than not, she repeatedly inserts her insect subjects into the scenes in the most rudimentary way—smack in the center of the photograph, over and over again. As a result, the complexity of the staged scenery is undermined by the over simple final composition. Few of the several scores of photographs succeed in displaying interesting and complex compositional designs—making it appear that the successes here were incidental rather than intentional.

One of these rare, successful images is “Idea leuconoe” (2003), where three specimens of the primarily black and white Idea Leuconoe, commonly known as the Paper Kite (or Rice Paper) butterfly, are placed on a musical score bearing dirty yellow stains. Asymmetrical balance, cropping, differing scale, and rhythmic texture come together to achieve a delightful effect: the colors and visual textures of the butterflies—each lying differently—on the score create a visually and conceptually engaging poetic image. One wonders: Is music like butterflies? Do butterflies flutter musically? What musical score is this, “Flight of the butterfly”? Et cetera. One can even forgive the butterflies’ sacrifice for the creation of this interesting image and can keep thinking about the content of this image while enjoying the photograph’s complex image. Too many other images in this portfolio are overly rational and heavy-handed.

An over rational example is the vivid blue of the butterfly in “Papilio ulysses” (2000). Here color dazzles the viewer’s eye so that the overall basic composition of the juxtaposing relation of the matching shapes of the south-end of the butterfly and the lower part of the complementing rusty orange background become of secondary importance to the image. The other compositional elements elsewhere in the image are not complex enough to engage a viewer for more than a Kodak moment or two and your eye continuously remains focused on the center of the overall image bouncing between the shape of the insect’s blue wings and the silhouette created from the rust below. Question: why is the rest of the image really there?

Jo Whaley, Papilio ulysses (2000),

_{chromogenic photograph, courtesy}

of the artist and Joseph Bellows

Gallery, La Jolla, CA.

Historically, color in photography becomes an issue because of its potential to disguise an otherwise weak image. Ansel Adams publically exhibited only his black and white images. He did photograph some images in color but kept the results locked away because he was fundamentally suspicious of color’s easy allure. Over and over the underused design elements in Whaley’s photographs exhibition compromise the potential quality of her images because Ms. Whaley’s images depend on the original saturated coloration of the deceased insects themselves. A delicate tug-of-war between aesthetics and ethics is at play here. Therein lays the question: do these depictions of the colorful bugs in a photograph contribute enough to justify the insect’s demise or would one rather see the color on the real insect itself?