As mentioned earlier, in film photography, color balance has a lot to do with the chemical composition of the film. For many decades, color film in the United States was calibrated to highlight Caucasian skin tones. This was the most fundamental problem. With an unusual degree of skill and attention, a photographer could compensate for the biases in most stages of production. But there was nothing they could do about the film’s color balance. When the famous New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was commissioned to make a film about Mozambique, he reportedly refused to use Kodachrome film – the most popular color film at the time. He complained the film, developed for a predominantly white market, was “racist.”
Positively fascinating story.
I fail to see how this is relevant to OSNews… I like the tech sector news, and following up on hobby OS updates, but this doesn’t seem to have any overlap except to say that digital sensors may still have racial biases.
http://www.osnews.com/docs/faq
OSNews has always covered a wide variety of topics. You are not forced to read everything we post, so if something doesn’t interest you, simply skip it. At the end of the day, it’s the people working on OSNews in their free time who get to decide what gets posted.
Edited 2015-04-25 00:31 UTC
I agree, but have realized OSNews is to be seen more like a blog for a few people than a professional news site like Verge and Engadget.
I personally visit OSNews every day, in hopes some small hobby OS news item pops up. The click-bait articles and “netherlands is best” commentary I can do without, but on the other hand, no other place offers hobby OS news from time to time (although rare on OSNews too these days)
You give us the budget and corporate financial backing and the the large staff that these sites have, and we’ll give you a site like that.
As it stands, we are essentially one guy doing the news in his free time when he’s not running his own company or social life, and another guy coding the site in his free time while he’s not working at his job or spending time with his family.
I don’t quite think you understand the kind of money and the number of people required to run a site like The Verge or Engadget. These sites are all backed by massive financial resources running in the millions of dollars per year. Expecting the same breadth from a few guys in their free time is beyond insane.
Wait. I understand. I agree. It’s basically what I implied.
I didn’t know this initially, but I recently come to understand that this is more of a blog.
I’m fine with that, once the expectations have been aligned.
I don’t know, its kind of a useful reminder to those of us whose work shapes the lives of others in a profound way to be more mindful of our unconscious biases we might have.
Photography developed in countries that had an overwhelmingly white population [approaching 100% in most of Europe until the 1950s]. Even the US was far “whiter” than at present due to the Northern European origin of most inhabitants before WW1.
Don’t mistake pure pragmatism for racism.
Certainly true that the original development was more pragmatic than racist.
But what about Kodak not working on darker tones until very recently when the chocolate and furniture makers started complaining?
You just answered your own question. Kodak responded to market demand.
Colour photography was a very expensive process until about 30 years ago. It was simply out of the reach of most people in the world. No company makes a product they can’t sell.
Kodak made colour film for the people who could afford to buy it. They were overwhelmingly affluent white people.
Pretty sure black people were affluent and in the market for colour photography long before those chocolate and furniture makers started complaining.
Or maybe black people just don’t have enough market power as chocolate or furniture makers?
You, westerners, are too obsessed with imposed politcorrectness. You see some form of oppression or racism in a damn chemical process.
But in reality who really cares about some black kid or tiny pregnant woman killed with assault rifle by police (just an example)?
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/03/idaho-police-shootin…
Racist film. So important. LOL
Edited 2015-04-27 20:02 UTC
Pretty sure slavery was purely pragmatic for a lot of people as well.
Can’t mod up the above, so I have to ask: why are people modding it down?
Does it, I dunno, hit a nerve maybe?
You’ve won the internet twice this week now.
Why do you use the past tense? There are more slaves in Africa and the Middle East than in anytime in history.
Good point.
Interesting indeed.
As to anyone complaining about the story: color management is an integral part of a modern operating system, and so are color profiles, especially for professionals. If you feel uncomfortable with the historic fact that there was a lot of racism in a lot of places, you might want to just not read it. See? It’s easy.
This article is about creating retrospective racism where none existed.
The fact is that colour photography was very expensive and the vast majority of purchasers were white.
Next you will be saying Chanel and Dior hate fat people because they don’t make sweatpants for the grossly obese.
Edited 2015-04-25 05:03 UTC
That’s a really poor example. Brands like Chanel and Dior are defined by exclusion. Being available to a wider array of people is bad for their business model – not because there wouldn’t be enough obese people buying their brand, but thinner people will stop buying their brand if it’s available to larger body types.
Though really, I would argue that applying such a business model to body type is unhealthy anyway. I mean, some people just happen to be stuck with mesomorphic or ectomorphic body types. Encouraging pride in thinness as a marketing tool seems… rather dirty to me, especially when you consider how that ties in with eating disorders and what have you.
Mind, I’m not proposing that “clothing brands exclusively for thin people” be banned or something stupid like that. But it seems to me that marketing these days is somewhat divorced from concepts of ethics and common decency.
> This article is about creating retrospective racism where none existed.
Umm. I guarantee you that racism existed in the photography business at that time, in the full gamut of tacit, deliberate, and whatever other forms. The question isn’t whether it existed. The question is whether it impacted photographic technology. The article’s answer, in view of actual historical evidence, is “hell yes.”
The fact is, cultural attitudes have an effect on developments in technology. If you ignore certain technological problems because the people impacted by those problems are second-class citizens, then your technology will suck at dealing with those problems. IOW, You Can’t Ignore Reality (TM).
I would argue that to call it racism it needs to be targeted against someone in a direct manner, otherwise it is just negligence.
To my country it took years that XBox Live or Android development became possible, even when most neighboring countries had the opportunity to use these services. I wouldn’t call these companies racist to Eastern Europeans. I work in a multinational company, where I earn half of the money for the same work as my colleagues from London, but twice as much as my Indian colleagues. Yet, this is not a racist culture, but you realize that this is how businesses operate.
With photography the problem is not with black people. The problem is that the same film which worked in most well lit environments did not work with people and objects whom and which had darker colors. The problem is dynamic range, not that it was not possible to cover these people/objects in themselves. Like the Polariod case showed it was easy to adjust lighting to get proper portrait photos, and they did so in support of the apartheid, which is more of a racist thing imho.
The problem occurs if you have to cover the object with its surroundings. Is the sky itself racist because it dares to be high contrast against black people? Some articles argue that even today cameras focuses on light spots instead of black parts of your image… And they think that it is racist, that light itself is white…
I do some photos just for fun occasionally, I have quite a good machine, even If I do not really understand how it works. But yet, I understand that if I am not in ideal lighting conditions the dark tones will get more messy than the light tones on short exposure. Because you know, we capture light with photographs, and what dark surfaces do not reflect that well is light.
“I would argue that to call it racism it needs to be targeted against someone in a direct manner, otherwise it is just negligence.”
Are you familiar with the concept of institutional racism? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism )
Again, criminalizing an ethnic group, or creating such conditions which omits them from education or healthcare, or a private company denying a service is very different from developing a new technology(here the result is Kodak Chromacolor) which addresses certain problems with previous technology. Especially if the problem is not that it is unable to capture black people(I think the idea itself is inherently racist), but that it has a low dynamic range. I do not understand why a company would not develop such technology, which is so widely used aside from portrait photography. I would assume it is either neglect or shortsightedness.
And what the competitors did about the same time? Could not have been a marketing feature in the 70s? We have better colors than Kodak! – sounds good to me. Or when Kodak came out with the new film and it was more expensive? Is that also a deliberate act of racism?
Maybe it was just racial intentions, but maybe they just did not care. They had a fairly good film at the time which worked for most cases even with people of color. They were satisfied with their cashflow and were not so keen to improve on their technology.
Regarding the Shirley cards… Working for years for BigCorp, I would say that sometimes seemingly simple ideas, like having different models, are often hard to develop. However they employed multiple models from the 70s as a standard, so that is a different thing. (Speaking of simple ideas, it is jawdropping to see that until the 2000s it was difficult for disabled people to get on a bus)
I used to use Kodak Ektachrome slide film.
I found it the most neutral of all the others on the market.
Fuji was too green and was made for pictures of little Jimmy on the beach under a blue sky carrying a red ball. Far too vivid for me.
Agfa was far to red.
I never shot portraits so any people in my piccies were there by accident.
The Kodak film gave me the most neutrally balanced result (IMHO).
I did use Fuji for underwater shots though.
I don’t care. Today one is assaulted with back people issues, the persecution of the Jews, women issues, sex gender something or the other issues, basically everybody has rights, everybody is a victim and it is political correctness all around. I hate it and I don’t care to find it on OSNews as well. Now you know that, and if you disagree, also know that you didn’t have to read it.
Yeah, wow, it’s really terrible that everyone has rights….
Well, I just hope that one day the back people can sit and eat in harmony with the front people and the left and right side people. Because when it all comes down to it, regardless of which direction of people we are. We are all people.
Can I respectfully suggest you go elsewhere then?
The reason behind all of this was most likely because the camera was developed during a time when the majority of people were white, and further more, the majority of the people who wanted their photo taken or lived that techno-savy life style were again the whites.
After all it is well known by now that many of the natives did not like to have their photos taken, nor did the blacks. Matter of fact many of the blacks and natives at the time were not interested in becoming a part of white culture and habits as it was, they were still trying to preserve what was theirs.
So all in all, who cares? Now a days things are different, blacks, natives, etc. All addicted to technology and other such things that were previous only an obsession of the dominating “white” culture. And because of this, someone thought to bring Camera technology up to date to work better with other skin pigments.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be a cause for some race argument or what ever. It seems to me that posts such as this only encourage racism, as well as broad and short sited views of history. They only serve to anger and divide rather than bring unity and peace.
On that note, I think we’d all be better off if we were laughing. Kick back, watch some Blazing Saddles, and be happy that we live in a time when we do not have to be part of the state and the media’s racism creating machine…
…well we still got to keep our eyes on watch over the liberal, the Marxist, progressive, humanitarian, etc. They still like to try to keep that pot stirred up, but for the rest of us, we can move on. Though in the mean time, it would not hurt to take the time to listen to the youth still trapped in the ghetto where there is not technology that aids them, no heart that goes out to them, and no opportunity around them.
1 – It isn’t an argument. It’s a discussion.
2 – It’s pretty much accurate.
3 – Your post illustrates why we still need to discuss this kind of thing.
This is an illustration of just how pervasive racism is, how it seeps into pretty much everything, and how white people utterly fail to even notice it, while denying that it’s going on at all.
Here’s the problem…
A group of white people, who are surrounded almost exclusively by other white people, built a product that only works for white people.
You’re trying to come up with some kind of post-hoc rationalization for it, be it technological or economic. That would be bad enough – the idea that you won’t be selling film to black people because black people are all poor is, of course, racist. But they would have done that deliberately.
The reality is that they didn’t even try, because it never even occurred to them. When working out them chemistry for the film, or coming up with the calibration images, they used white people. Because, to them, the default idea of a person is necessarily a white person, and they would never have even considered including non-white people in that.
Racism does not have to be deliberate. In this case, it happened simply because people assumed that white people were representative of everyone, without ever realizing that they were making that assumption at all.
This is important to discuss, because this still happens. Lot of racist ideas still permeate our culture, without white people noticing them, and most of the people who could do something about it won’t listen, and won’t accept that there’s still a problem.
Same thing happens with sexism and misogyny – women see it all the time, while men are blind to it. Or straight people failing to see how pervasive homophobia and heteronormativity is. This kind of thing is everywhere, and unless it happens to be targeting you, you’ll never see it.
The solution to this is to be aware that this kind of thing might happen, and always consider your own biases.
Edited 2015-04-25 13:41 UTC
Racism did exist, mind you though, racism is not a natural occurrence within human beings though.
If you take a group of mixed race children and put them in a room together, they will play and will not see a difference between them selves, except only maybe on a skin color level, but that’s because their skin IS a different color, not because those kids are racist.
Historically, racism has to be breed and fostered for the most part. Back in the day, the European elite wanted to take advantage of the Africans and use their resources, and use the people them selves to do their labor.
A mythology had to be created to get the people to go along with this, and thus racism was born, that is to say, the whole “us and them” equation; what makes them, less human than us, or even subhuman for that matter.
This technique is not used against races though, as it is also applied to the sexes as well. At one time some men of certain cultural backgrounds and upbringing, demonized the woman to try to keep her in her place, thus keeping all the power, ambition, and influence to himself.
Now a days we are experience the after effects of third wave feminism, which also uses myths to demonize men and often times to argue in defense of their own chauvinistic behavior which is in fact often modeled after the particular kind of man they were demonizing in the first place. I.E., “men can sleep around and be crass, so we should be able to sleep around and be crass”, as opposed to,”why don’t we take our feminine strengths and attributes and try to show these particular kind of men what true honor and nobility is?”
Now because of this, we have even more orphan children running the streets, because there was no compassion in some of these people’s hearts, and not truth behind their mantras, but only a hard and greedy heart. Alas, many of them became the very thing they hate and in turn, have a hard time understanding the opposite sex because again, they have projected their phobias upon all men. I mean after all, have you ever heard that “1 in 4 men are rapists or wife beaters” propaganda? That means that a whole lot of our fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers were all a bunch of raping scum, well according to them.
Mind you, there are those situations where a person’s racism is born from the fact that the racist in question grew up around whites, blacks, natives, or what have you, that were not necessarily good people.
And through that finite experience, they began to believe that those who they had come into contact with, represented them all.
Mind you again, aside of maybe being born in a racist family or community also, it does not help that the media and the state ALWAYS has to point out a person’s race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. This only serves to re-enforce certain naive assumptions by said parties. As another example, have you ever saw a news report about a nerdy young boy who all the girls turn down and laugh at in school, so he goes home one day and kills himself? No you don’t, but the media is flooded with reports of kids who happen to be going through gay motions, got rejected, and killed them selves.
The bottom line is that yes, racism was historically real, that is why those blacks or natives who might have wanted technology and the ability to take family photos could not afford the technology, because they were not often invited to join in on the reindeer games unless of course, in most cases not all, they were willing to shed their religion, their culture, spirits, language, history, etc. and assimilate them selves into the dominating, now European culture.
Of course that is not to say that all Europeans are or were that way, but if you read the history books, whites that did not follow along with the program were treated just as bad as the blacks, natives, Chinese, etc. I mean who died in the factories, in the coal mines, and so on? Who was punished for trying to go and live with the natives, or standing up for the blacks?
And not that it matters, but I write that is an Irish/Shawnee/Cherokee who does in fact hold a lot of sentiment for what has been lost, and what has been put in it’s place since then, but that’s no reason for me to hate all whites, Europeans, or what have you, it only encourages me to be open and honest about how I feel, and be a part of the people and community that are an immediate part of my life. Anger from the past only serves as an anchor, it’s the madness of today that we need to worry about, it is propaganda, ideologies, those who wish to lead us strictly through passion or reason, but not through both, or more importantly, leaving it up to us to make up our minds, leaving it up to us to study our own history, and draw our own conclusions, as I really don’t want to be a slave to another ideological cult.
“during a time when the majority of people were white”
Splutters coffee all over keyboard.
Interesting story, I am really looking forward the next one, when they discover, that ASCII is racist when it tends to prefer the English language, or that early computers were unable to express the Chinese language, that sounds pretty racist to me too.
Yeah, early films had low dynamic range, and if you had a black person to photo, than you had to apply more light, also if you had lighter or darker shade you got a problem. Yes, when you were too white like you had a problem too. And in a country where this problem was affecting 10% of the population, and it took them 30 years to solve it, buy making progress in technology. And miraculously confectionary and furniture industries did not complain until the 80s, and suddenly everything changed….
ASCII and Unicode have already been covered (here on OSNews, no less). ASCII was limited out of necessity, but overuse of it right now might well qualify as a form of racism.
As for Unicode, what is being done with it is definitely racist. I mean, prioritizing smiley faces and even a literal pile-of-crap glyph over popular extant languages? Come on.
Weren’t there similar limitations in technology back in the 50s in the US?
The problem here if I understand correctly is not that they were unable to picture black people correctly, but that the technology lacked the proper dynamic range.
So there was a product which covered 90% of the population(in theory, in reality probably really pale and darker whiteys had there problem too, and like the article mentions this exist in other practical applications) and which covered probably most of the paying customers. And even whom were in a disadvantageous situation, the only scenario when this appeared was in mixed high dynamic range environments. So, obviously there was little incentive to push this technology ahead that quickly.
get in the way of you reading the above article. Srsly, it’s a good article, and well written. Get over your collective rage and/or guilt reactions and actually read it, please, instead of just guessing everything from Thom’s synopsis.
Also, IMO this is a good example of how racism gets so pervasive that many people don’t notice it. Before reading the article, I had no idea that racism affected the photography business… like, at all.
Edited 2015-04-25 19:10 UTC
It isn’t a good article, it’s complete bollocks.
It’s a typical example of a reporter trying to stir up some animosity where none is due.
Film is limited in dynamic range, even now. Lighting has to be adjusted accordingly. Knowing that is what makes a photographer.
The article even contradicts itself. It says the colour was balanced for white skin tones, then quotes “In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I’m a blue black”. That suggests colour balance was a problem in general; either that or the processing wasn’t consistent which makes the whole argument moot.
All technology evolves over time. Making it a racist issue is just a farce.
Kodak’s films were always optimized for landscape photography.
Pretty inventive history — but it’s total crap, written no doubt by some starry eyed hipster millennial who wants it so bad to be true. I’m a child of the 60s. We grew up with race riots on TV and our generation fought hard against it. I also spent nearly 3 decades in photofinishing and here’s the simple race-free truth, kids: it was never about skin tone. EVER. Color was balanced to white not as the color of objects but to the color of LIGHT. We had to teach this ALL the time to customers back in the day because they couldn’t understand why skin wasn’t perfectly reflective of its true color under, say, florescent light. We could and often did adjust, where we could, for skin tone when requested — but we couldn’t do it without affecting ALL the picture. Race never had a thing to do with it. Artificial light cast a pall on all kinds of skin. Caucasian, to be truthful, was the most frequently adjusted skin tone because it was the most reflective. All rules of science here, friends, not race. And that crap about the photographer who wouldn’t use Kodachrome? Laughable. Why? Because Kodachrome was the first real commercially available film and what made it unique is that dyes were not added to the film until processing. Until film essentially died it was the gold standard of ALL film products for color and, right on the box, it was based on the color temperature of daylight. This generation of ignorant, agenda-driven journalists wants to paint all history greater than 20 years as purely racist. Racism exists, existed and WILL exist because humans are human. I don’t excuse racism in any sort. But this type of article is pure crap.
“This generation of ignorant, agenda-driven journalists wants to paint all history greater than 20 years as purely racist.”
People like Jean Luc Goddard you mean? Rated as one of the best film directors of all time, who described Kodachrome as racist.
(As you would know if you’d read the article properly)
Well, that one might just have been a common moron. Being one of the best film directors of all time does not mean you can’t be total ignoramus outside of film-making business.
Awwwwwww, it really is adorable that you believe you have grounds to be condescending – when your “rebuttal” is nothing is nothing more than a blatant example of the “Appeal to Authority” fallacy.
This article ignores the fact that taking a good photo of a scene with both dark and light objects is a difficult task.
Simple and exaggerated description of the basic problem:
Dark objects -> you need to gather as much light as you can onto your sensor (or film), because dark objects reflect little light.
Light objects -> you need to gather as little light as you can onto your sensor (or film), because light objects reflect lots of light.
Edited 2015-04-27 10:43 UTC
Clear this means that the human optic nerve AND the visible light spectrum are both racist.
I’ve a dSLR camera and two black, one white cat and some others.
But the black ones are always a bit difficult to capture and the white one is sometimes overexposed.
It’s an available light issue.