Going Beyond Illustration

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But bright colors can be inflected to deliver bad news too. In Mark's picture of an old man in his single room, a stark but sickly light signals that the indignities of age are no less painful for being suffered in the sunshine. The red label on a jar of coffee peeks from the refrigerator, an emblem of that sparkling world just outside, but the atmosphere is keyed to the humble brown mess at the bottom of his cooking pan. There must be times in this sunny town when the laughs come hard. That picture points to the prime dilemma of color reporting. Color is pretty, misery is not. Susan Meiselas followed the war against Somoza in Nicaragua. Jean-Marie Simon covered life in Guatemala during the worst years of military repression in the early 1980s. When men with automatic weapons stalk the streets, how do you keep the pinks and greens of Central America from trivializing the image? Meiselas and Simon do it by letting both elements -- beauty and mayhem -- make their simultaneous statements.

What their pictures prove is that in the right hands Kodachrome can go to the heart of an important paradox: that suffering can happen in sensual settings, that a place can be cruel and inviting all at once. This is something different from the plain bass note of tragedy played in black-and- white photography. Just as the world does, these sweet-and-sour pictures leave us to face the contradictory visual facts and to sort them out for ourselves. The chance to sharpen the moral faculties may be this show's most unlooked for benefit. Any exhibit can introduce some little pictures. How many help to clarify the big one?