How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color

I disagree with this nonsense. I was a photojournalist for Reuters during the tail end of the film era; 1996-2002 and the issue with black subjects had nothing to do with color balance but of the latitude of the film; we used Fuji almost exclusively and since I did tons of sports and low light spot news, It was mostly 800 speed occasionally pushed hard.

Shooting NBA meant I had mostly black subjects. The film didn't discriminate: in most arenas if the time, we shot at 500/2.8; for a darker arena, we'd increase the processing time (or if we had an especially important shot, increase the chemical temperature, effectively overclocking the processing.) my point is that dark skin or light, the color balance made no difference; it was about exposure. Since we held shutter speed and aperture constant (2.8 was the fastest aperture for 400mm lenses and anything below 1/500th would get motion blur,) our exposures were relatively constant regardless of the subject's skin color. The problem is if you have a bunch of white guys and one black guy, auto-metering would expose in such a way as to render the scene equal to an 18% grey card. So the black guy would be under exposed. However, if you took a photo with 20 black guys and 1 white guy, the white guy would look like he was made out of white light: he'd be dramatically overexposed because autometering it exposed for 18% grey. If you had used an incident light meter, generally the scenes would be fine because the meter wouldn't be trying to 'grey card' the scene.

As far as Jean Luc and his 'racist' Kodachrome, I suspect that's apocryphal. Kodachrome is notoriously difficult to expose correctly; meaning you typically want to expose for highlights because it has a very narrow latitude and blasting out highlights is a real concern. There's nothing racist about it, it is just a very difficult film to light correctly, especially if he were shooting on location in Africa.

But what do I know, I am a white guy so I obviously don't quite understand the struggle to make everything into some kind of racist conspiracy.

The fact is that if film were racist, Spike Lee and others would have been screaming about it. This is the first I've ever heard of this theory and I was a film junkie for a long time as well as a fan of Ernest Dickerson and Bob Richardson; never once have those guys mentioned racist color balance. The argument is just absurd.

If we want to talk about racism in Hollywood, we have about a million potential topics, but film stock isn't one of them. What next, lenses are racist?

> Focus it on a dark spot, and the camera is inactive. It only knows how to calibrate itself against lightness to define the image.

I don't know much about photography, but AFAIK, modern cameras need contrast to calibrate themselves, not lightness (or darkness). Point the camera towards a dark corner, nothing. Point it towards the sun, nothing. Point it towards a sharp edge of a shadow, or any other high-contrast area, an voila, focus!

Yeah even the paper cited notes that it's a technical challenge to make multiple races in the same shot look good using either film or video cameras, and so in the past things were just optimized for the predominant racial category in the largest markets they sold to. But at the same time, they were always improving their ability to capture more. Kodak created different emulsion properties for the Asian/Japanese market since they weren't white, consistently improved the ability of their films to capture contrast and detail, and created test cards that featured multiple racial groups in one image. Obviously Fuji was not "optimizing for whiteness," since they uh, weren't white. Well, not exactly true. The paper mentions that there are widespread cross-cultural beauty preferences for lightness. Kodak improved their film to capture multiple races, and created test cards for multiple races. Imagine you're making film and you can capture 85-90% of people within the existing scope of technology. You do that and you sell it, and you work on improving it.

There was a ton of interesting history and information in the paper, but I didn't even think it totally supported their own thesis, I kind of thought it worked against it. Film and video weren't "optimized for whiteness" they were optimized for markets and huge parts of those markets weren't even white, so they optimized for non-white in those markets. They wanted to sell more, so they improved their film by spending time and money on technical innovation. These things aren't free, early cameras made everybody look like shit. They got better and still are.

edit: here's the paper: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2196

And there was racism happening, I am not denying that, but it was overstated imo.

Is there actually a primary source from someone at Kodak saying "Yeah, we intentionally limited the dynamic range because we didn't care about photographing people with dark skin"?

It would be very easy to believe that the limited dynamic range was for financial reasons (lower cost of manufacture) and not overt racism.

This article is about a thousand assumption and biases, each of them small, that together accumulate to create a disadvantage for a group. This is what racism is. It doesn't mean someone wearing a pointy hood decided the film formula.

FYI - this seems to be the original article on which this is based (granted this is more neutral): http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-...

That said - I think her chief complaint is misplaced. Ie - it is mostly a technological issue - shooting black subjects well (whether people or objects) is hard. Cameras have only so much "dynamic range" - meaning ability to capture light and dark matter. So if you expose for black skin, it will render rest of the image blown out (meaning you can't see anything else).

I found the paragraph describing how the Whoopi Goldberg show is shot illuminating - two separate cameras have to shoot Whoopi and her guests.

Anyone have side-by-side versions of the same image with one version being "less racist"? I'm having trouble seeing it.

Although what the author says conceptually makes sense, the photo of the schoolchildren looks fine to me. And I believe many scenes of 12 Years a Slave were intentionally dark - I'm sure the outdoor scenes or the indoor scene at the end when Solomon Northup comes home had much more contrast on purpose.

In the TV industry, it's well-known that the human eye is unusually sensitive to the color of skin. If a tree is the wrong color, no one will notice. If skin is even a little bit wrong, it looks horrifying.

I've always worried that, being of Northern European ancestry, perhaps my eyes are evolved to be more sensitive to white skin. I know I'm nowhere near as sensitive to color shifts in dark skin versus skin that is close to my own shade.

Does anyone know of any studies on this subject? I'd love to know whether or not my perception is universal or not.

It's entirely possible that knock on effects of the standards used for designing and calibrating film, color or non, have caused most mass-produced color film for generations to be better at capturing pale skin tones than at capturing dark ones. This article has done a terrible job of making this argument. That alone is not enough reason to dismiss the argument completely, as I find myself itching to do and many of the commenters before me have already done.

It's a sad statement on our state of news, or perhaps it has always been that way. I'd love to do a comparison of news article comparing the plight of the negro from the '60s or the debates over slavery from the abolitionist era to the modern race debate. I'm afraid we've not changed at all; That the color of skin is fundamentally divisive, and we won't get past it. In fact, the final line of the article seems to confirm it: "that the tools used to make film [and] the science of it, are not racially neutral". She is blaming the physical laws of nature for being racist. I don't get how we get post-racial if we're expected to change the unchangeable to suit.

The dynamic range limitations that slide film has and early color negative film had during the last century is a technology limitation.

The progression of film development is toward more dynamic range, finer grain, greater speed (sensitivity to light), and to truer color and color fastness. If Kodak, or any other film maker were able to make a color film which could capture the wide dynamic range of skin tones, it's likely they would have. The benefits of a wider dynamic range have implications that even if the thesis of this article were true, would have driven the marketplace to adopt this better film. Greater dynamic range is a generally desirable feature.

Film, as a technology, is limited. What I would consider to be a more interesting discussion, would be to address the decisions made by photographers that resulted in the underexposure of non-white skin tones.

I'm fully willing to believe that a photographer took a photo of a group of people of mixed races, exposed the image such that the white people were properly exposed and called it a day, simply because in their estimation the proper exposure of the black faces was unimportant. I can also believe that this happened quite a lot. This can seem rather passive, on the part of the photographer, who can claim that film just can't capture the dynamic range, rather than taking the time and effort to light the people properly, or other measures necessary.

One could also argue that 18% gray, as the default for exposure metering, prioritized the white face over the black one.

The substance of the argument that film is racist, could be rooted in these sociological issues, in the choices that were made by individuals everywhere, their assumptions and their decisions about who mattered.

I think I'd be interested in finding out whether, say, Gordon Parks had anything to say in regard to photographic film being subject to racist influence.