These pieces continued my interest in the assignment of literal meaning to color as I had begun previously in the Treasure Tones paint-chip pictures. I asked the model to hold colored cards selected from a deck of 6x9-inch Coloraid. She positioned them at her own discretion, and I aligned my camera with the cards. While working on the project, I considered Tom Wesselman’s “Great American Nudes,” Mel Ramos’ pinup paintings and John McCraken's serial color slabs particularly pertinent. My intention was to apply to my photography some of what I had learned by looking at Pop and Minimalist artworks. In this way these pieces reprise turn-of-the-20th-Century Pictorialism when photographers such as Stieglitz, Steichen, Kasebier and Demachy based their photographs on the art of their day—Impressionist paintings.

Cherie Holding Colored Cards was photographed in 1976 using Kodachrome film. I enlarged the transparencies in 1978 onto Polaroid print material and presented the small pictures on a grid of nine or sixteen images. I reprinted the complete set in 1984 as Kodak Ektaflex 8x10s and revisited the set again in 2011 when I scanned the original Kodachromes to make 24x34-inch digital-pigment prints.