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Having read the article (and being just enough of an amateur photographer to know how hard it is to take good pictures, and how much harder it was when working

Having read the article (and being just enough of an amateur photographer to know how hard it is to take good pictures, and how much harder it was when working in film instead of digital) I don't actually think the headline is over-stating the case at all.

ohiovr 7y ago
Is the camera obscura racist?
- Coffeewine 7y ago
  From the article: Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I can see the case she’s making for film photography, but her remarks on digital photography came off as having a bit of a gripe against physics itself. Any darker and lower-contrast object is going to be more difficult to photograph in detail than a lighter higher-contrast object. To imply that the reason technology hasn’t sufficiently (in her opinion) overcome this challenge is due to racial bias is quite a leap. Especially since low light and low contrast photography has such a broad application outside of photographing people, and is met with all the same challenges.
- mirimir 7y ago
  No, not any more than eyes are. At least, with a neutral projection surface. But once you add technology for recording photographs on film, or creating and displaying digital images, there's potential for racism. I know next to nothing about photography. But it seems pretty clear that building stuff that works well for everyone is a hard problem.
  - ohiovr 7y ago
    I take issue with this article simply because photography isn't a technology at all. It is an art that uses technology. There are millions of pictures of people of all races that look perfectly fine. I take issue with stirring up people for no reason. If a maker of paints in the 1800s owned slaves does that mean that painting (then, now, in the future) is racist? How ridiculous can we get?
    - dang 7y ago
      Sure it's ridiculous. But also it's not what the author says. Therefore your comment breaks this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and doing a better job of posting substantively here? You've posted one-liner flamebait twice already, which is not cool, especially on a divisive topic.
      - ohiovr 7y ago
        I will just avoid these articles. Sorry i hurt the outrage.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      If "millions of pictures of people of all races ... look perfectly fine", that just means that those photographers had requisite skills. And cared enough to get it right. But the issue isn't so much about those photographers. It's about the defaults designed into film, cameras, photosensors, and so on. As TFA discusses. So random users -- and even many technicians -- don't get good results when they rely on the defaults. As in "your jacket is lighter than your face". And that's even an issue for many "white" people, which is why TV makeup is such a thing. And about your paint maker. If they didn't care very much about painting dark-skinned people, maybe they wouldn't put much effort into researching and developing paints that worked well for that. It's exactly the same issue as with Kodak in TFA. So is that racism? One could argue that it's just not caring very much about some race(s) of people. But one could also argue that anything that's race-based is racism.

ohiovr 7y ago

Is the camera obscura racist?

Coffeewine 7y ago
From the article: Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  I can see the case she’s making for film photography, but her remarks on digital photography came off as having a bit of a gripe against physics itself. Any darker and lower-contrast object is going to be more difficult to photograph in detail than a lighter higher-contrast object. To imply that the reason technology hasn’t sufficiently (in her opinion) overcome this challenge is due to racial bias is quite a leap. Especially since low light and low contrast photography has such a broad application outside of photographing people, and is met with all the same challenges.
mirimir 7y ago
No, not any more than eyes are. At least, with a neutral projection surface. But once you add technology for recording photographs on film, or creating and displaying digital images, there's potential for racism. I know next to nothing about photography. But it seems pretty clear that building stuff that works well for everyone is a hard problem.
- ohiovr 7y ago
  I take issue with this article simply because photography isn't a technology at all. It is an art that uses technology. There are millions of pictures of people of all races that look perfectly fine. I take issue with stirring up people for no reason. If a maker of paints in the 1800s owned slaves does that mean that painting (then, now, in the future) is racist? How ridiculous can we get?
  - dang 7y ago
    Sure it's ridiculous. But also it's not what the author says. Therefore your comment breaks this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and doing a better job of posting substantively here? You've posted one-liner flamebait twice already, which is not cool, especially on a divisive topic.
    - ohiovr 7y ago
      I will just avoid these articles. Sorry i hurt the outrage.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    If "millions of pictures of people of all races ... look perfectly fine", that just means that those photographers had requisite skills. And cared enough to get it right. But the issue isn't so much about those photographers. It's about the defaults designed into film, cameras, photosensors, and so on. As TFA discusses. So random users -- and even many technicians -- don't get good results when they rely on the defaults. As in "your jacket is lighter than your face". And that's even an issue for many "white" people, which is why TV makeup is such a thing. And about your paint maker. If they didn't care very much about painting dark-skinned people, maybe they wouldn't put much effort into researching and developing paints that worked well for that. It's exactly the same issue as with Kodak in TFA. So is that racism? One could argue that it's just not caring very much about some race(s) of people. But one could also argue that anything that's race-based is racism.