The racial bias into photography

Shirley Cards

When the first coloured analogue films were developed, white skin was the baseline. In the 20th century, Kodak invented a colour reference chart called Shirley cards to perform skin colour balance in photography. Photographs of white women were then used to calibrate lights, shadows, and skin tones.

By using white bodies as the standard to produce and print photos as closely as the human eye, non-white skin tones did not stand out or appear realistic, becoming deviations. The failures when capturing skins of a colour other than white were not errors in the film but were chosen.

This lasted from the 1940s until well into the 1970s when furniture design companies complained that their wooden furniture did not look good in films. It turns out that the emulsion was so deep in light tones that it did not differentiate between dark brown and light brown later. 

As film and television also became more diverse, the racial bias of the film became more apparent.

The social movements of this decade also did a lot and in the 90s the deviation of the films was mostly fixed, normalizing then non-white tones of the skin. 

If you are interested in this much more, here is a video of the subject with extra information:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Npr.org. 2021. Light And Dark: The Racial Biases That Remain In Photography. 

Buzzfeednews.com. 2021. Teaching The Camera To See My Skin. 

Nytimes.com. 2021. The Racial Bias Built Into Photography (Published 2019).