Pink!

Like? Dislike? What is it about this colour?

May 17, 2025

A change of pace this week…

Pink is a project I started a bit light-heartedly about three years ago because we had a few pink things around our house at the time (courtesy of my colourful wife Debbie!). But despite the slightly easy-going start, I now definitely think it has potential as a longer term photographic project and I’m really interested, as I photograph more pink, to see how it grows.

There’s a lot in the psychology and history of the colour pink. I’m interested in the fact that it’s a colour with strong gender associations (often seen as a ‘girl’s’ colour) but in the 18C it was very much a man’s colour and a signifier of the masculine and the virile.

It has also been a colour positively associated with the LGBTQI+ community, and as such has in the past few decades been reclaimed from it’s very fraught and painful history as the colour used in Nazi Germany for the downward pointing triangle identifying homosexual men and transgender women in concentration camps.

It’s used for breast cancer awareness and as a sign of female strength, and women’s rights. In this context, companies that try to jump on the bandwagon of promoting women’s rights (and indeed LGBTQI+ rights), but don’t have the necessary underlying ethics to support those stances, can be described as engaging in ‘pinkwashing’ for commercial and reputational gain.

It can be seen as vibrant, creative, euphoric even. But can also be viewed as childish, soft and weak. It’s a colour with much to say.

As a starting point for the project, I’ve been searching for and seeing beauty in the ordinariness of the pink things around me. I’m not sure where it will lead but I’m hoping (in fact I’m almost sure) it will be fascinating.