The colours we share
Angélica Dass has taken thousands of portraits matching skin tones to pantone colours, so many in fact, that she ran out of existing colours in their library. The background for each portrait is tinted with a color tone identical to a sample of 11 x 11 pixels taken from the nose of the subject.
Her photographs (featured in HUE) are startling in their simple power.
We are all a shade of the same colour spectrum - humanity.
As adults, we recognize the beauty of differences but many children grow up in communities without diversity, so Angélica has written a children’s book The colours we share to spread the word of common love and respect. Her map of human skin tones can make a big difference to a child’s view of the world. Different skin tones are a thing of great beauty to be celebrated not feared.
On her site HUMANAE, a nonprofit she created to challenge the myth of race, Angélica states “Intolerance related to race, religion, and color negatively affects self-esteem, personal achievement, and community relationships--particularly among young persons.
Within the classroom, intolerance becomes discrimination, removing one's ability to see value in oneself and the others: it muddies the beauty of diversity that marks authentic education.”
The Colors We Share encourages ”looking, questioning, and thinking bigger—inviting us to think about race, and our common humanity, in a new way.”
“Using this scale, I am sure that nobody is ‘black,’ and absolutely nobody is ‘white’… these kinds of concepts that we used in the past are complete nonsense,” artist Angélica Dass told Newsweek
Image by Angélica Dass, fromThe Colors We Share(Aperture, 2021).© Angélica Dass.