The Truth About Photography and Brown Skin - Jezebel
▻http://jezebel.com/the-truth-about-photography-and-brown-skin-1557656792
Over on Buzzfeed, writer and photographer Syreeta McFadden eloquently, thoughtfully and patiently breaks down the problem: Photography has an “inherited bias” against dark skin. McFadden explains that when it came to the invention of color film — developed to be used by the public and taken to a lab — “the technician worked off a reference card with a perfectly balanced portrait of a pale-skinned woman.”
They’re called Shirley cards, named after the first woman to pose for them. She is wearing a white dress with long black gloves. A pearl bracelet adorns one of her wrists. She has auburn hair that drapes her exposed shoulders. Her eyes are blue. The background is grayish, and she is surrounded by three pillows, each in one of the primary colors we’re taught in school. She wears a white dress because it reads high contrast against the gray background with her black gloves. “Color girl” is the technicians’ term for her. The image is used as a metric for skin-color balance, which technicians use to render an image as close as possible to what the human eye recognizes as normal. But there’s the rub: With a white body as a light meter, all other skin tones become deviations from the norm.
This is how modern photography was calibrated: Using a white woman. Which means, as McFadden points out, “film stock’s failures to capture dark skin aren’t a technical issue, they’re a choice.”
