In the days of film photography this was an important issue - negative/slide film chemistry had a huge impact on the output of your work. I used to shoot a lot

In the days of film photography this was an important issue - negative/slide film chemistry had a huge impact on the output of your work. I used to shoot a lot of Fuji Velvia due to its excellent contrast and reasonable resolving power. It was terrible for portraits, though, of any race - it picked up too much red in both light and dark skin tones, and the result rarely looked good. However I definitely think that it was true back then that more portrait orientated film chemistry was poorly optimised for those of African descent or with similar skin tones. I'm less certain it's such an issue today. Some cameras have face recognition built in as a focus/af assist, and I suspect that these are better with some faces than others (most consumer cameras are developed in asia so I'd except them to do best with asian faces, but as I don't use this sort of feature I don't know). Other than that, I'm struggling to come up with a way that bias - in the way I'd define it - could creep in. In-body JPEG colour profile perhaps, but most serious photographers don't depend on that, and it can be rectified in post anyway. On the other hand, there's the unfortunate technical problem that dynamic range is limited, and having a subject with very large contrast between skin and clothing brightness is technically challenging to shoot, especially in a situation like the one illustrated where the subject can move around so you have limited fine grained control over lighting. I'm totally on board with presenting the former film chemistry issue as bias - but that's pretty much just historical at this point. The number of people shooting events on slide film is pretty close to zero these days. There's also very little if any investment into film chemistry as a consequence of this. The second issue irks me a bit. If you have very dark skin and wear very light clothing, or very light skin and wear very dark clothing then it's going to be more of a challenge to capture you effectively. That's physics not racism, and conflating the two issues feels a bit disingenuous to me.