Red Sunsets, Emerald Beatles

Have you ever seen a Megaloxantha nemixanitha? A Chelorrhira polyphorus confluens? A Chrysochroa bugueti, or a Damaster blapordes mantames? Didn't think so. But Barbara Norfleet has, and she's got pictures to prove it.

Norfleet is the founder, director and curator of the Photography Collection at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and her new book The Illusion of Orderly Progress is a collection of photographs of insects. Having published multiple photographic collections before in a similar style, the medium and the style are not new to either Norfleet or her audience. So we are forced to ask the obvious question: why bugs?

As it turns out, Mother Nature has won again, as the choice of insects has evolved from Norfleet's earlier works. Norfleet comments that "Animals have always sneaked into my photographs. A project on a colorful bachelor emphasized his dog; one on the hidden upper class resulted in boxes of horse pictures...." And, as she continues, "My desire to seek color, humor, beauty, to never forget skies, to record wrongs, made insects a natural choice for the present project."

Natural as the choice may have been, Norfleet chose to place her insects, which she ordered from a mail-order catalog akin to L.L. Bean, in a distinctly unnatural setting. She uses rocks, sand, wood and sky to create the environment for each photograph, augmented by the vivid colors she uses to highlight the insects and illuminate the sky.

Each photograph is accompanied by an explanatory, and often witty, title in the facing page. Through these sparse titles we can begin to glimpse Norfleet's intent and can start to uncover the narrative she's constructed.

The first image is titled "My People" and consists of a large grasshopper standing on top of a boulder with wings outstretched, gesturing to "his people" in front of a blazing red sky. Norfleet continues with more abrasive images, such as "The Expectation of Submission." In this photograph, smaller insects have become caught in a wall of straw while larger bugs hover menacingly above. The entire composition is anchored by an erie red moon placed in the center of the photograph.

Norfleet echoes the vertical elements used in "The Expectation" in "My Tribe Is Better Than Your Tribe," a battle scene between two rival gangs of beetles. The beetles are all brandishing long spears with red and black tips, making the composition reminiscent of Paolo Uccello's "Battle of San Romano," painted in 1455.

The photographs then move into a happier, more light-hearted section that reveal Norfleet's humor. "Toys" is a charming (well, as charming as beetles really can be) whimsical photograph of three insects flying kites. (The kites are also other insects, which suggests darker connotations to "having fun.") The tension throughout the book between terrestrial and aerial insects is successfully addressed in this photograph through the device of the kite's string, which acts as a unifying force between the sky and the sand.

Norfleet's "Frolic" is also cheerful, while "Who's the Fairest of Them All" provides witty commentary not only on the aesthetics of insects (which not all of us find as attractive, as, say, horses or bunnies) and our own human vanity through the Narcissus allegory but on the inherent vanity in artistic expression as well. The photograph is also a display of Norfleet's artistic ingenuity, as it integrates both the insect and its mirror image seamlessly. Later in the book, "Of Course We Prayed" presents a similar commentary, as Norfleet uses praying mantises as a clever pun on her perception of the spirituality in America today.

The collection ends with a group of photographs that are more satirical than light-hearted or abrasive, as in "Real Estate," a photograph that depicts three insects hanging onto three separate branches stuck into three separate, walled-off areas of plots of land. In "Heroes," three insects stand atop white platforms of varying heights, their arms outstretched in a victory pose, while in "ship of fools," three insects look out into the distance from the bow of an oyster shell, while another tires to pull a drowning companion aboard.

But my favorite photograph by far was "Yet Another Post-Modern Sunset," in which various bugs look over a stone wall at a vivid sunset of oranges and reds. Norfleet is simultaneously poking fun at both the post-modernists and herself. But she is also creating a striking contrast between the fiery imagery of the sunset and her final piece, "Untitled," where Norfleet's insects appear embedded in a glacier, with only a few appendages exposed to the light.

By leaving her last piece untitled, Norfleet is using a device to force her audience to pause and reflect upon what they have just seen. Why did she leave her last piece untitled? What would I title it?

Norfleet gives us some clue as to her position as she writes, "My insects became the survivors in a barren world as they played out history." So maybe Norfleet left the last photograph untitled as a segueway into the future, in another clever pun. After all, ugly as they may be, bugs are the oldest things around.