IN THE PINK is a book-length project of documentary photographs about the idea of the color pink in America. The work playfully examines pink as a locus of politics, gender, history and aesthetics.
In the Pink
“In the Pink” is a book-length documentary project about the idea of the color pink in America. The work playfully examines the color pink as a locus of politics, gender, history and aesthetics.
Pink draws the eye and affects our senses. People typically love or loathe the color.
Pink means feminine, it means girl, it means female. It connotes innocence, vulnerability, and softness. It can be intimate, romantic, or Hot Pink; it can mean powerful, provocative or shocking (Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking Pink), aberrant or sickening (Pepto-Bismol pink), eccentric, defiant, liberating, playful, or plastic (pink flamingos!).
For some people pink means gay; in pornography it is slang for vagina. Pink is often a gender marker and gender is contested terrain.
Pink also carries rich political history. For generations ‘Pinko’ has been a put-down to anyone with left-wing views. As a child, I understood that by not voting for Nixon my parents were perceived to be Pinkos.
The Nazis used a red triangle to mark political prisoners, and a pink triangle to mark homosexuals – a pink triangle that gay rights activists turned upside down and re-appropriated as a symbol of pride in the 1970’s. That same symbol was immortalized during the AIDS crisis in the Silence=Death posters, completing the transformation of a color symbolizing femininity and used to humiliate, into one of solidarity and defiance.
Why is pink for girls and blue for boys? One historian asserts that the pink/blue gender binary was brought into the mainstream in 1927 when an art dealer created a media circus around Henry Edwards Huntington’s acquisition of two 18th century British portraits, Thomas Gainsborough’s painting “Blue Boy” and Sir Thomas Lawrence’s “Pinkie.“ An orchestrated media campaign and the commerce of art helped forge an enduring cultural construct. The public loved Pinkie and Blue Boy, popularized for decades in pageants, porcelain figurines, and the ubiquitous kitsch reproductions hung in homes.
The breast cancer movement, Code Pink, roller derby warriors, the Pink Pussyhats, the singers P!nk and Janelle Monáe are all reaffirming pink as a color of inclusive feminine power - even against a backdrop of gender reveal parties, pink princesses, and pink-washing.
The color pink wields its power as a transitive color, a signifier that mutates to reflect changes in our culture. Pink means feminine and it is an implied slap, a ‘dirty word’ as the painter Joan Mitchell said. As a young woman, that’s how I felt, and I kept the color pink at bay. No girly-girl adornments that could make me vulnerable, or put me in a box associated with “less than.”
Now I enjoy pink, and I remain leery of the color. Ideas provoked by pink will be contested until it truly becomes okay to be whoever we are. Pink is the color that is more than a color. But it is just our mirror. Pink enlivens the visual landscape, it is fodder for our cultural and political agendas, and it is the color of our insides, all of us.
Smithsonian Magazine The Many Manifestations of the Color Pink by Erin Corneliussen