In my world cinema class this week we talked about how the colors of a developed film are based on a thing called the Shirley card and, between the 1940s and 1990s, the accuracy of the colors in the photos was based on a Shirley card with solely white-based skin tone. In other words, the chemical solutions used to develop color film would only create a color balance that favored white people (Kris Paulsen).
To me, this is a clear example of implicit bias that was allowed to continue on for far too long before it got addressed and it had major implications. Right from the start, this inequality allowed for a light skin tone to be established as the national ideal in all forms of film and photos. Not only would this leave room for racism in cultural discourse, but it would also underrepresent people with dark skin tones in media, film, advertisements, photography, and more. We can look at the next layer of racial discrimination here and note how this could’ve been used to keep black people out of the film industry as actors since the colors would not be realistic. Even if they were able to make it into a film, the audience may be unable to relate well to their character or sympathize because if the color is too unrealistic, it may act in dehumanizing ways. To this final point, Marjane Satrapi knew the power of a dehumanizing visual which is why she chose to make her characters visually simplistic in Persepolis, in order to avoid “Othering” by her global audience.
This topic can be viewed in relation to De Beauvoir’s theory in which men are viewed as the default sex, or the One, and women are defined in contrast to men, as the Other. The issue of the Shirley card perpetuated a cultural bias along these lines in which people assume and accept whiteness as the default rather than working to create a narrative in which having a full spectrum of skin tones is the norm.
Today many of the issues have been fixed with the introduction of new camera technology and Shirley cards, however, there are still times when film’s inherent bias shines through (see the video above for more details). While the industry works on making technology an equalizer, we as a society should uplift actors or models with darker skin who as a group have a history of more barriers to overcome in order to make it in the industry. If we ensure people with darker skin tones get into the media then it will create a new norm where the representation of all people is the national ideal, not light skin tones.
Link to further reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html
Works Cited
Kris Paulsen, Module 8.2, History of Art 2901, 26:35
The video shared as well as the first paragraph of the blog post were kind of mind-blowing to me. I had no idea that this practice had gone on, but now thinking back on it there must’ve been a reason that photos taken between those times looked brighter and clearer if they were taken of white people. It’s great to see technology nowadays fix this problem, even if there are still a few issues. Relating to the white = default skin color section, it reminded me of elementary school art class, when there would be many different colors of crayons. I remember always referring to the beige/tan one as “skin color” or “flesh”, maybe because I didn’t know better or maybe because that’s what the crayon said. Either way, there should be no default skin color, and I know that Crayola had fixed any possibly racist colors when they made the skin color inclusive pack with many different shades. I like how your blog post made me think about these things, and because of that I really enjoyed it.
Wow, I never knew about this until reading your post. This clearly shows a bias and racism towards people of color. It’s sad to think back to times like this when families of color wanted to just capture wholesome images on special days and they couldn’t even do something as simple as that without remembering or feeling discriminated against.
I’m really happy you choose to write about this topic as I feel like many people are unaware of it. I wrote an essay about this last year and was shocked and disgusted with the information I found out. In my essay, I talked about a similar topic. Specifically the lack of proper representation of minorities in films!
This is a form of systemic injustice because of the level of unbalance between skin tones. I did not realize that multiple mediums were affected by the color film. Earlier this year, I had read about whitewashing seen in animated shows especially in Star Wars where there were skin tone alterations that did not fit the actors or later versions of the character. I think that this post further reminds me of the growing technology and ability to correct past mistakes.