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As a dark skinned photographer I always am annoyed by the take that “white people who designed cameras made them take better photos of white people.” No, that’s

As a dark skinned photographer I always am annoyed by the take that “white people who designed cameras made them take better photos of white people.” No, that’s not what is happening. The fact is that you get a lot less light from a dark face, and the nature of light sensing technology means that it’s going to be harder to take a picture of a dark face holding all else constant. Of course you can use exposure compensation etc but the “white supremacy” hot take is very misinformed.

Swizec 5y ago
My understanding of the argument is that institutional racism means all the white people simply didn’t think about photographing dark people. Not so much “omg evil they purposely excluded blacks!!” and more “wow it didn’t even cross their minds as important, if there were more black people in those positions they’d probably think of that” ie. it’s about using more inclusive test cases and acceptance criteria for engineering projects Edit: then again they could still decide to make the tradeoff to “ignore” 13% of the population in their products if the extra engineering required increased costs/time by enough
- silisili 5y ago
  I (an outsider), think you're about half right. Most photography until relatively recently was just dumb tech. Decide an exposure and go. It just so happened that it worked out well for lighter skinned people, and less so for others. In that I mean, I don't think the companies were ever purposefully blind to darker skins - just stuck with it and said 'good enough ship it.' It also makes me wonder what if a darker skinned person invented the tech. Would they say it's garbage? Did that give light skinned people an advantage? Interesting thoughts. Even today this is only accomplished on phones by HDR to the point of making every photo look fake. Apparently photography is hard, it must be if we are still here with this problem... which makes me appreciate my own eyeballs even more.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    In the 99pi episode they talk about how Kodak released better film in the 70s/80s that could take good pictures of dark people and marketed it as “Able to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light”. Widely considered a coded phrase for black people.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Marketing speak, no matter how poor taste. I mean, how long have laundry soaps been saying they make whites whiter? At my age, soaps should be making plasma if these advances held any credence. That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast. Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?
      - jacobolus 5y ago
        > cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software). > Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
- michrassena 5y ago
  I think essentially that's what this boils down to. Color slide film of the time, like Kodachrome, had a narrow range of exposure. I see no reason to believe this was anything but a technical limitation. A slide film with more stops of exposure would have been a huge commercial success. Given that narrow range, you could either expose for lighter or darker skin tones. And this is where institutional racism creeps in. In a group where everyone had similar skin tones, you wouldn't face an issue exposing the film properly. But where there was a variety, it was commonplace to treat exposing for the lighter skin tones as more important. The group with darker skin was treated as if it didn't matter, or mattered far less. I think this is the key idea. Even rejecting the idea that Kodak and other film companies made the choice to exclude a group of people, they created a default, an inertia, which had to worked against to be equitable. My mind keeps coming back to the Pareto principle. In pursuing the 80% of customers might be the wealthier group, the easier to convert, the most likely to use your product, is it often the same %20 who are left out and don't they matter?
  - dagmx 5y ago
    It's not just about exposure though. It was about color reproduction too.
    - michrassena 5y ago
      That's a fair criticism. You could make the case that the film companies didn't care enough to test the film's color reproduction for anything but caucasian skin tones, or didn't put the research dollars into fixing the problem. At the root of that would be racism.
      - dagmx 5y ago
        I like the term this presentation took for situations like this with "anti racist research" https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 Like you said, at the root of that is racism, but the presentation frames it in an interesting way. Not everyone who takes part in this research is racist, but they're the products of racism in society. So color not being accurately reproduced could either be a direct product of racist people or the result of people in a society that doesn't value everyone equally. But I like the wording of "anti racist research" because it pushes the onus to actively trying to analyze if things are fair, rather than assuming they are. Even people who aren't actively racist can benefit their research from trying to push past the biases inherent in society that permiates everything
dagmx 5y ago
The difference in exposure is perhaps part of it, but the reality is that film at the time couldn't accurately represent darker skin tones. It's not even just about exposure, but color itself wasn't accurate. That's compounded by how much lighting education is based around white people with blond hair. This talk from SIGGRAPH 2021 is excellent at going into the history of film and lighting and how it favors a very specific look https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  The color was not just inaccurate for black skin tones, but for everything, though. So it seems likely it was a technical limitation, not racism. At first there was no color film at all, only black and white photography. People seem to take color film for granted but it was a genuine technical invention.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    There is no such thing as accurate colours when you create a picture on paper. It is simply not possible. What you are doing is making tradeoffs of what looks good and what doesn't. And the tradeoff that was made was that white skin needed to look good and black skin didn't matter.
    - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      Isn't the issue rather with the background that is woo white (at least in the sample photographs of the article)? How do you even make black skin look bad?
pvg 5y ago
This particular article doesn't contain a 'white supremacy' hot take, though.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  No, it's just meant to be a subtle reminder of your white guilt.
pseudalopex 5y ago
The article didn't say supremacy. I think the closest it came was bias. It cited a former manager of Kodak Research. And 1 of its points was holding all else constant was part of the problem.
- LogonType10 5y ago
  Do you think it's impossible to imply something without saying it ("dog-whistling", if you will)?
  - arrrg 5y ago
    Didn’t even imply it. The criticism is pretty clear: even though this was obviously a problem it wasn’t addressed for decades. That’s the point. There is no talk about the initial design.
    - LogonType10 5y ago
      Didn't imply what?
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I think it's certainly possible to imply something without saying it. But I think it's important that we don't assume that anybody who doesn't say X is implying X just because they talk about Y which other people use to imply X. Otherwise it becomes impossible to talk about Y. If you think in this specific case that the authors are implying X by saying Y, then you need to explain why you think that.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  That former manager, Earl Cage, is long dead. I don't think he was interviewed for this article.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    The interviewed a professor who interviewed him. Does it matter?
bo1024 5y ago
A few issues with this. (1) it can be both. Disadvantages of dark skin tones combined with apathy/lack of effort to address it. (2) It can be an effect of systemic racism without being an intentionally conscious effort at white supremacy. (3) People did tune the technology specifically to improve for their main subjects, who were white. Again that's not to say they intentionally made them worse for others, but that was still the outcome. (edit: 4) do you disagree with anything specific in the article?
makeitdouble 5y ago
Are you talking about now ? 20 years ago ? 50 years ago ? What specific fact are you disputing from that piece ?
- resonious 5y ago
  I only skimmed the piece but from my skim it had some undertones of "institutionalized racism in the camera industry". In particular: > ... And that’s because, even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range. And that bias has been there since the very beginning. And that bit is in the intro portion of the article, making me think that it's part of the premise that the camera is "not a neutral technology".
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    You are right, in that the article doesn't see camera (or any technology really) as neutral. For those not familiar with 99pi, the focus is on how makers/designers make choices that can often be invisible to us, but influence the environment we live on. This is a fantastic podcast I would recommend to anyone curious about the world we live in. It has biases, but they are stated and argumented, not just thrown around irresponsibly. In this specific case, there was two specific angles: - the film industry as a whole didn't really care about diversity, and film dynamic range was deemed good enough if it could represent lighter flesh tones and bright surroundings. Kodak exec is quoted on this subject as really not giving a damn about darker skins, and their rationale for making efforts to expend dynamic range a lot further was to allow better representation of white and dark chocolate products, among others. You might disagree with that take, but it all comes from Kodak employees from that area, as far as I understand. - the other was on print calibration: whatever you did with your camera, printing at a Kodak shop would be done with presets setting adjusted for light tone skins (the "Shirley cards" of the title are the photos of white girls used as reference) Here again, the info comes from technician working on printing at the time. PS: Then there's more stories on group photos, light meters etc. if you care at all I would recommend listening to the whole thing. I also do photography (as an amateur) and it was still interesting to me.
elil17 5y ago
This makes no sense given what it says in the article: that the problem more or less went away once black consumers started complaining and Kodak changed their film chemistry.
- LukaszWiktor 5y ago
  The article says that Kodak changed their film chemistry _not_ because of they were listening to the complaints from people of color, but rather because they were going to lose the business of two big professional clients: a chocolate company, and a furniture company.
munificent 5y ago
A typical camera can take a well exposed photo indoors under natural light and outdoors in full sun. The former is about 50 lux, and the latter is 100,000. It seems unlikely to me that the amount of light reflected off darker skin fundamentally confounds cameras when they can handle four orders of magnitude of illumination variation gracefully.
908B64B197 5y ago
> No, that’s not what is happening The issue is, you might get a thousand reader interested in the physics and chemistry of film in a specialty magazine about photography. And the oral history of black photographers of that era and the tricks that they used to capture these hard to get ranges of color. Or, if you write it online and blame racism, you can get 100'000 readers once you get someone majoring in liberal arts to share it.

Swizec 5y ago

My understanding of the argument is that institutional racism means all the white people simply didn’t think about photographing dark people. Not so much “omg evil they purposely excluded blacks!!” and more “wow it didn’t even cross their minds as important, if there were more black people in those positions they’d probably think of that” ie. it’s about using more inclusive test cases and acceptance criteria for engineering projects Edit: then again they could still decide to make the tradeoff to “ignore” 13% of the population in their products if the extra engineering required increased costs/time by enough

silisili 5y ago
I (an outsider), think you're about half right. Most photography until relatively recently was just dumb tech. Decide an exposure and go. It just so happened that it worked out well for lighter skinned people, and less so for others. In that I mean, I don't think the companies were ever purposefully blind to darker skins - just stuck with it and said 'good enough ship it.' It also makes me wonder what if a darker skinned person invented the tech. Would they say it's garbage? Did that give light skinned people an advantage? Interesting thoughts. Even today this is only accomplished on phones by HDR to the point of making every photo look fake. Apparently photography is hard, it must be if we are still here with this problem... which makes me appreciate my own eyeballs even more.
- Swizec 5y ago
  In the 99pi episode they talk about how Kodak released better film in the 70s/80s that could take good pictures of dark people and marketed it as “Able to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light”. Widely considered a coded phrase for black people.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Marketing speak, no matter how poor taste. I mean, how long have laundry soaps been saying they make whites whiter? At my age, soaps should be making plasma if these advances held any credence. That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast. Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      > cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software). > Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
michrassena 5y ago
I think essentially that's what this boils down to. Color slide film of the time, like Kodachrome, had a narrow range of exposure. I see no reason to believe this was anything but a technical limitation. A slide film with more stops of exposure would have been a huge commercial success. Given that narrow range, you could either expose for lighter or darker skin tones. And this is where institutional racism creeps in. In a group where everyone had similar skin tones, you wouldn't face an issue exposing the film properly. But where there was a variety, it was commonplace to treat exposing for the lighter skin tones as more important. The group with darker skin was treated as if it didn't matter, or mattered far less. I think this is the key idea. Even rejecting the idea that Kodak and other film companies made the choice to exclude a group of people, they created a default, an inertia, which had to worked against to be equitable. My mind keeps coming back to the Pareto principle. In pursuing the 80% of customers might be the wealthier group, the easier to convert, the most likely to use your product, is it often the same %20 who are left out and don't they matter?
- dagmx 5y ago
  It's not just about exposure though. It was about color reproduction too.
  - michrassena 5y ago
    That's a fair criticism. You could make the case that the film companies didn't care enough to test the film's color reproduction for anything but caucasian skin tones, or didn't put the research dollars into fixing the problem. At the root of that would be racism.
    - dagmx 5y ago
      I like the term this presentation took for situations like this with "anti racist research" https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 Like you said, at the root of that is racism, but the presentation frames it in an interesting way. Not everyone who takes part in this research is racist, but they're the products of racism in society. So color not being accurately reproduced could either be a direct product of racist people or the result of people in a society that doesn't value everyone equally. But I like the wording of "anti racist research" because it pushes the onus to actively trying to analyze if things are fair, rather than assuming they are. Even people who aren't actively racist can benefit their research from trying to push past the biases inherent in society that permiates everything

dagmx 5y ago

The difference in exposure is perhaps part of it, but the reality is that film at the time couldn't accurately represent darker skin tones. It's not even just about exposure, but color itself wasn't accurate. That's compounded by how much lighting education is based around white people with blond hair. This talk from SIGGRAPH 2021 is excellent at going into the history of film and lighting and how it favors a very specific look https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8 https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
The color was not just inaccurate for black skin tones, but for everything, though. So it seems likely it was a technical limitation, not racism. At first there was no color film at all, only black and white photography. People seem to take color film for granted but it was a genuine technical invention.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  There is no such thing as accurate colours when you create a picture on paper. It is simply not possible. What you are doing is making tradeoffs of what looks good and what doesn't. And the tradeoff that was made was that white skin needed to look good and black skin didn't matter.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Isn't the issue rather with the background that is woo white (at least in the sample photographs of the article)? How do you even make black skin look bad?

pvg 5y ago

This particular article doesn't contain a 'white supremacy' hot take, though.

iratewizard 5y ago
No, it's just meant to be a subtle reminder of your white guilt.

pseudalopex 5y ago

The article didn't say supremacy. I think the closest it came was bias. It cited a former manager of Kodak Research. And 1 of its points was holding all else constant was part of the problem.

LogonType10 5y ago
Do you think it's impossible to imply something without saying it ("dog-whistling", if you will)?
- arrrg 5y ago
  Didn’t even imply it. The criticism is pretty clear: even though this was obviously a problem it wasn’t addressed for decades. That’s the point. There is no talk about the initial design.
  - LogonType10 5y ago
    Didn't imply what?
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I think it's certainly possible to imply something without saying it. But I think it's important that we don't assume that anybody who doesn't say X is implying X just because they talk about Y which other people use to imply X. Otherwise it becomes impossible to talk about Y. If you think in this specific case that the authors are implying X by saying Y, then you need to explain why you think that.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
That former manager, Earl Cage, is long dead. I don't think he was interviewed for this article.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The interviewed a professor who interviewed him. Does it matter?

bo1024 5y ago

A few issues with this. (1) it can be both. Disadvantages of dark skin tones combined with apathy/lack of effort to address it. (2) It can be an effect of systemic racism without being an intentionally conscious effort at white supremacy. (3) People did tune the technology specifically to improve for their main subjects, who were white. Again that's not to say they intentionally made them worse for others, but that was still the outcome. (edit: 4) do you disagree with anything specific in the article?

makeitdouble 5y ago

Are you talking about now ? 20 years ago ? 50 years ago ? What specific fact are you disputing from that piece ?

resonious 5y ago
I only skimmed the piece but from my skim it had some undertones of "institutionalized racism in the camera industry". In particular: > ... And that’s because, even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range. And that bias has been there since the very beginning. And that bit is in the intro portion of the article, making me think that it's part of the premise that the camera is "not a neutral technology".
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  You are right, in that the article doesn't see camera (or any technology really) as neutral. For those not familiar with 99pi, the focus is on how makers/designers make choices that can often be invisible to us, but influence the environment we live on. This is a fantastic podcast I would recommend to anyone curious about the world we live in. It has biases, but they are stated and argumented, not just thrown around irresponsibly. In this specific case, there was two specific angles: - the film industry as a whole didn't really care about diversity, and film dynamic range was deemed good enough if it could represent lighter flesh tones and bright surroundings. Kodak exec is quoted on this subject as really not giving a damn about darker skins, and their rationale for making efforts to expend dynamic range a lot further was to allow better representation of white and dark chocolate products, among others. You might disagree with that take, but it all comes from Kodak employees from that area, as far as I understand. - the other was on print calibration: whatever you did with your camera, printing at a Kodak shop would be done with presets setting adjusted for light tone skins (the "Shirley cards" of the title are the photos of white girls used as reference) Here again, the info comes from technician working on printing at the time. PS: Then there's more stories on group photos, light meters etc. if you care at all I would recommend listening to the whole thing. I also do photography (as an amateur) and it was still interesting to me.

elil17 5y ago

This makes no sense given what it says in the article: that the problem more or less went away once black consumers started complaining and Kodak changed their film chemistry.

LukaszWiktor 5y ago
The article says that Kodak changed their film chemistry _not_ because of they were listening to the complaints from people of color, but rather because they were going to lose the business of two big professional clients: a chocolate company, and a furniture company.

munificent 5y ago

A typical camera can take a well exposed photo indoors under natural light and outdoors in full sun. The former is about 50 lux, and the latter is 100,000. It seems unlikely to me that the amount of light reflected off darker skin fundamentally confounds cameras when they can handle four orders of magnitude of illumination variation gracefully.

908B64B197 5y ago

> No, that’s not what is happening The issue is, you might get a thousand reader interested in the physics and chemistry of film in a specialty magazine about photography. And the oral history of black photographers of that era and the tricks that they used to capture these hard to get ranges of color. Or, if you write it online and blame racism, you can get 100'000 readers once you get someone majoring in liberal arts to share it.