Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today

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John Baldessari. Common Memory Colors: Flesh, White, Grey, Black, Sky, Grass, Sand. 1976

American, born 1931 Color photographs. Seven photographs, each: 11 x 14" (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Collection Carol and Arthur Goldberg. © 2008 John Baldessari.

Artist, John Baldessari: This is John Baldessari. I got interested very much in color coding... like in wires and electric circuitry .. you know, there's one color for this wire, one color for that wire, one ... and it's not about having beautiful colors, it's just for identification.

Kodak film, in the packaged information that came along with it, they had a section, called Common Memory Colors. And these are the colors people were most critical of when they saw a color photograph. The colors used in Common Memory Colors, as described by Kodak were flesh, white, grey, black, sky, grass and sand. And so I'd walk out of the door, and flesh, okay, the first person available would be me, and so I'd just photograph some of my own flesh,.I think probably my hand. And then sky is an easy one, I'd just shoot overhead. And then you look for some grass and you shoot that, and so on.

I still try to use color in an unaesthetic way, where I have a system in mind that I put in place.