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One time I read an article that said photographic film was racist because it was developed to make it easier to photograph light things than dark things because it was made by white people.
- iced depresso likes this.
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The truth is that they had calibration cards that included a white human subject but it an irrefutable fact that capturing light and dark in the same photograph was a hard problem and the problem went away as they improved the technology rather than because of complaints about racism
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@sun i've been told some cinematographers still do this. carrying a blank sheet of white paper because as long as its in the footage it makes white balance adjustment trivial (just eyedropper the paper and backprop until white)
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@sun i would argue that early photographic film wasn’t racist, it was just humanphobic due to how it was sensitive to more blue light rendering anyone, dark or light in a weird, “hyperreal” way
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I asked it about this, I assumed that if someone was photographing black people they didn’t just give up because there was a calibration card with a white person on it
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Gonna just note that the way they solved it was adding more light to the shot lol
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@sun@shitposter.world eyes are racist gouge them out you bigot
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To be clear: most of the racism claim came from one person who claimed that film companies never cared about photographing dark subjects until furniture companies complained. That’s straight up bullshit only a liberal would believe
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@icedquinn @sun From the Olympus E-PM 1 manual. That's the process for correcting white balance in every manual for every stills and video camera I have.
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@sun god is racist because he let there be light rather than let there be dark
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@sun lol maybe they had a point
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@joey there is bias but I decided it didn’t extend to the actual formulation of the film itself
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@joey basically I’m admitting that Kodak set the default to an 80 percent white American market which actually makes sense, but they could have just included a sheet for other races but they didn’t until 1996 lol. I tried to find if they shipped different calibration cards in their Africa market but there’s no documentation
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@sun I don't know if there is a bias. That's from for Japanese brand cameras made in the 2010s, of which I have several and there seems to be a theme of featuring white people in the manual images and I was making a joke.
Totally agree that anybody claiming the film to be racist is absurd.
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@joey here’s more discussion:
> No I am admitting the calibration cards was bias, they could have released a guide for black skin tones at any time but they didn’t. So that’s clearly racial bias. But I am saying I don’t believe the issue wasn’t taken seriously until the 1970s, that is remarkably late for an industry that undoubtedly was being used to photograph products from the very beginning. Professional photographers knew it already. They were the Kodak market. It is impossible they didn’t know or didn’t care. Probably the 1970s is just when they were able to ship a commercially viable improved formulation finally.
That reconciles the evidence better than either extreme. A few things line up in favor of it.
**Kodak's own R&D and professional-market channels would have surfaced this problem decades before the 1970s.** Vericolor and its predecessors (Ektacolor, going back to the 1940s–50s) were explicitly professional-grade products marketed to working studio photographers — people shooting weddings, portraits, product photography, catalog work. Those photographers were Kodak's direct commercial feedback loop, filing technical service complaints, requesting custom emulsions, and working closely with Kodak's professional products division. Given that, the idea that Kodak was simply unaware of a limitation affecting a meaningful share of that market until an advertiser mentioned chocolate is hard to credit at face value.
**Your reframe — "1970s is when they could finally ship a fix, not when they first noticed" — fits the pattern of how emulsion R&D actually works.** Photographic emulsion chemistry doesn't move in sudden leaps; it moves through incremental, compounding improvements across product generations, each requiring new coupler chemistry, layer structures, and manufacturing process changes that take years to validate and scale. A company doesn't go from "unaware of a problem" to "shipped a solution" in the same decade unless the underlying R&D had been underway for a long stretch already. 1974's Color Negative II being explicitly billed as delivering extended latitude and better flesh tone reads much more plausibly as the output of a multi-year (likely 1960s-launched) development program reaching commercial maturity, not a rapid response to complaints.
**This also better explains why the fix, once it existed, wasn't quickly or fully applied to the calibration cards.** If the limitation had genuinely been "we just didn't know," you'd expect the multiracial Shirley card to follow close on the heels of the 1974 film improvement. Instead there's a 20+ year gap between the improved-latitude film and the 1996 multiracial card. That gap makes much more sense if the calibration bias was a separate, low-priority default that nobody bothered updating — exactly your original point — rather than something waiting on a technical fix. The technology to correctly calibrate for darker skin existed well before 1996; the card simply wasn't updated because there was no commercial pressure to do so, distinct from the film chemistry problem which did require real engineering time.
So the fuller picture: Kodak's engineers were very likely aware of and working on the latitude problem across decades, the 1970s marks a shipped product, not a moment of first awareness; and the calibration card issue was a separate, easily fixable default that Kodak simply left unaddressed for another two decades after the technical excuse had expired. That last gap is the part that's hardest to defend as anything other than institutional indifference.
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@leyonhjelm @joey that is correct the main African market for Kodak was white South Africans. Apparently Africa shared a single distribution guy with all of Europe, 90 percent of Kodak market was USA. The Japanese market ended up growing and they did in fact make a calibration card for Japanese skin lol
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@sun
On a financial level the African market would also be white
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