IIRC, Hollis Todd at RIT taught us that Kodak would regularly do stat research
on what constituted "a good print" or "good color" by poling its employees of
which they had (at that time) at least hundreds. They would show samples of
varying tone, contrast, color hue, etc., etc analyze the responses and adjust
the manufacturing of the materials accordingly. Given how bloody conservative
Rochester was (even when I was there up to 1975) you can rest assured that the
vast majority of employees where white. So, the BASIS of the argument is not
that far fetched...it is the wildly unsupportable conclusions drawn from that
basis that are disturbing. If these materials were so bad, how is it that so
may African American photographers made such amazing photos? Just naming those
that come immediately to mind: Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee, Roy D'Carava,
Carrie Mae Weems, etc., etc. And the second photographer I assisted in NYC in
the early 70s was Mel Dixon, an African American who shot for Bazaar and many
top fashion and cosmetic clients. All these photographers managed to render
great photos of black people with these "racist" materials.
Sure, I was regularly challenged with lighting and processing to shoot white
people and black people in the same scenes or shoot white fabric fashion on
black female and male models. The photo materials weren't "biased"! They were
simply limited in their dynamic range and I had to use both light and
processing to get both the lighter and darker skin tones within that dynamic
range. Remember, I wasn't just trying to make a good b&w print or pretty
transparency...I was trying to produce images that would survive the plate
making and printing process to look great on the magazine page. Believe me,
that was more demanding and I had to work a bit harder to harness those darned
old racist films and processes!!! LOL!!!
On April 27, 2019 at 2:58 PM Laurence Cuffe
<dmarc-noreply-outsider@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don’t know about this. There is a deeper message, under the text, but
whether that reflects racism or a cultural history is unclear. This sentence
“ The same technology that misrecognizes individuals is also used in services
for loan decisions and job interview searches.” seems to me to be a fairly
wild extrapolation. Its true, in the sense that one might condemn the use of
all language because language has often been used to convey racist message.
Its only when one gets much more specific, as in identifying specific words
and phrases, that one starts to say something meaningful.
Another article (2014) on this theme is here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/16/303721251/light-and-dark-the-racial-biases-that-remain-in-photography?t=1556390819214
A very similar one from 2015 is here:
https://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-film-was-originally-biased-toward-white-people/
I’d like to see more hard evidence of a technical nature, and a little
less of just restating the same content. My one bit of research on this was
to look up my copy of the Kodak book of photography, published in the 1980’s,
and when I look up skin colour, I get to a two page spread emphasising the
value of using diffuse lighting to capture a broad range of skin tones, and
two sample photographs one of which has a white person, and the other has a
black person.
On the other hand very many of the stock photographs in the book are of
white people.
Best regards
Laurence Cuffe
> > On 27 Apr 2019, at 06:45, `Richard Knoppow <
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx mailto:dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ;> wrote:
A very interesting piece in the New York Times. I am not sure if
you can get this if you are not a subscriber.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html?fallback=0&recId=1KR9IFPlZ6miFSSI3JWdGAQSz3I&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=CA&recAlloc=story&geoCountry=US&blockId=home-featured&imp_id=603095924&action=click&module=editorsPicks&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html?fallback=0&recId=1KR9IFPlZ6miFSSI3JWdGAQSz3I&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=CA&recAlloc=story&geoCountry=US&blockId=home-featured&imp_id=603095924&action=click&module=editorsPicks&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
--
Richard Knoppow
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
WB6KBL
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