The models who established the ideal skin tone for development along with the most controversial word in the history of humanity: "normal."
Susan Sontag wrote in her book
On Photography
that they “not only show what there is but what an individual sees, they are not only a record but an evaluation of the world.” James Baldwin added: “It is said that the camera cannot lie, but we rarely allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you see.” Sontag herself predicted back in the seventies that today's world would be choked with images. And it has happened: the overdose of digital images has returned us to analog photography, whose sales tripled in 2023. Developing film is giving us back the notion of waiting and its retro colors have resurfaced like an old idyll. However, beneath them a grammar persists, an “ethics of vision,” as the historian Luis Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez points out in his book
Visual culture in digital and posthuman times.
For example, the racist vision of the society by and for which they were invented. To understand it, it is necessary to know the history of the Shirley card, or how the “normal color” determined our gaze.
In the 1950s the world seemed different when the possibility of being immortalized in color arrived. Technicolor provided hundreds of brilliant colors to movie screens and little by little also to television screens, and the so-called chromogenic prints finished giving the boot to black and white by painting commercial photographs. You no longer had to be a star or an aristocrat to get a portrait that showed green eyes... and white skin. But racialized people could forget about that future, because the development of color photos became standardized through a card that the manufacturing company of the moment, Kodak, distributed to all the commercial laboratories in the world. In it appeared the portrait of an anonymous woman who had given her a name: Shirley. Next to this woman, as a sample, six shades of different labeled colors (the three primary colors, that is, red, yellow and cyan blue, and intermediate colors such as pink, green and another shade of blue).
It didn't take long for this model to be nicknamed the “color girl.” With a white dress, black gloves, a pearl bracelet and brown hair, her portrait was the result of a more than measured mixture of those colors. The “colored girl” had light eyes, and her skin too. Below it the word “normal” could be read. Shirley was thus the image of a quality control that did not allow more options when it came to portraying people: in each studio, in each laboratory, the developing machines were manually calibrated by a technician who must not lose sight of her. In the words of Sarah Lewis, professor of Art History and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, developing became “ensuring that Shirley's face looked good” in any photograph. At the same time, in film and television, these cards received the name “China Girl”, making a supposed reference to the porcelain mannequins used in the first screen tests, which defined the field of professional makeup for sets. .
Lewis explained in 2019 in an article for
The New York Times
that this translates today into the color balance of digital technology, in the way in which digital camera sensors detect or not detect subjects when they are in automatic mode, and this same thing has been used to build an entire network of video surveillance systems that, by default, have a predilection for racialized people, as Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), revealed a few years ago, and which director Shalini Kantayya captured in the documentary
Coded Bias
(Coded Bias), available on Netflix.
The "China Girl", or the (white) reference model for the balance of light and colors in film and television.CC BY 2.0 Deed
The defect, in reality, is a kind of wild card that hides a modus operandi: the women who appeared on those Shirley cards were many, but all selected by a handful of men to turn them into the reflection of a single one. The first step, some eyes, a hair color, a height and width and a skin tone. Then she touched on a type of neckline, a hairstyle, a style of clothing. Lastly, don't forget to smile. The way in which we have assumed the representation of the world depends on this process. Objectifying the Western ideal of the female body through the mass production of
Shirleys
managed to make the dream of the dominant gaze a reality. Photographer Laurent Leger Adame reminds us: “Technology should equalize everyone's experience, but it is made of human beings, and those human beings come with social parameters.”
Leger's day-to-day life consists of working from this perspective. As a racialized person, he has learned to solve the predetermined “errors” of cameras that make it difficult to represent those who have darker complexions than what the standards of photographic technology reflect. He explains, for example, that in the case of digital cameras the machine parameters can be better adjusted so that dark skin is well represented, but since the films and sensors were manufactured with white as a model, what happens is that when you start adjusting to better approximate dark skin the background of the image will tend to become overexposed. Then, “it is up to one to decide whether one prefers to sacrifice the appearance of the rest of the image so that the person is perceived better, or risk disadvantaging them to seek homogeneity.”
Nowadays, at least, the possibilities of subsequent editing on a computer remain: increasing the shadows, balancing the contrast... Even if you work in analog. “Of course, it is still unfair, because you have to dedicate more time to some people than others just because they are black.” This effort has been established from the beginning at all levels where the image operates. Some professional photographers, for example, already switched to Fujifilm brand film at the end of the last century, because it allowed dark tones to be shown more clearly than Kodak's.
Kodak's multiracial card, established in the 1990s to correct the errors of the initial "Shirley card." CC BY 2.0 Deed
Alternatives have also been sought in cinema. Award-winning cinematographer Bradford Young, who has worked with director Ava DuVernay, among others, continually seeks out new techniques for lighting subjects during the filming process. For her part, director of photography Ava Berkofsky recently pointed out in an interview on
Mic
her tricks for lighting the actors of the HBO series
Insecure
. The best? Moisturizing cream, he claimed, because it makes the skin shine, which takes us back again and again to the beginning of this story: “It can give a porcelain-like appearance,” objects Leger, not very enthusiastic about the idea.
The adventures that racialized people are forced to go through in order to be seen accurately on camera are multiple and, to say the least, complex. Lorna Roth, a researcher in media and communication studies, points out that film emulsions, that is, what covers the base of the tapes of a reel and that reacts with chemicals and light to produce an image, “could have been initially designed with more sensitivity to the various skin tones, more yellowish, brown and reddish, but for that, even now, the design process would have to be motivated by a will.” The will to, as Leger says, deconstruct not only looks, but also lenses.
There wasn't, so for decades millions of people were trapped in a blackness that hid their faces. Furthermore, “Kodak never encountered a wave of complaints from African Americans about its products because many of us simply assumed that the shortcomings of film emulsion performance only reflected our shortcomings as photographers,” Syreeta McFadden acknowledged in 2014 in a article for BuzzFeed. Roth, in fact, discovered that the change in the Shirley card only came when furniture and chocolate manufacturers pressured the company between 1970 and 1980 to correct this color bias, because adapted to Shirley, nor the different types of chocolates Not even the grain of some woods could be seen in the catalogues. In the case of people, change seemed impossible.
Almost half a century later, it is in the aesthetics of those times where they are finding a kind of refuge. “I see many current photographers who when they photograph a black person base themselves on old photos that they have taken as inspiration, and I still see in magazines photos of people who have a dark skin tone, but not as dark as the photograph shows, and this It happens because you don't go beyond that inspiration, because they are using old film to get as close as possible to those photos without asking anything else, so they tend to
blacken us
out of inertia," says Leger, who assures that magazines and the media They are favoring professionals who work in medium format, that is, who develop in analog. He himself prefers it, in any case, “because the result of analog photography, on a technical level, is another story. It's about learning to handle it."
Leger maintains that if you dig deep, you can control the timing of the composition with those rolls, but in general, especially white photographers, they don't. Meanwhile, that technical quality of the analog image returns with its double side. It is so popular that it is even emulated digitally, with Instagram filters as an example. The design of the logo of said application originally wanted to resemble a Polaroid camera. What some may not know is that it was precisely this camera, and specifically its ID-2 model, that was chosen as a police tool for racial segregation during the apartheid era. With it they photographed black people, mostly men, for police notebooks.
As McFadden noted, the ID-2 has a flash boost button designed to add 42% more light to your subjects. The effect of this flash caused “a deliberate obscuration of the racialized subjects.” In an interview granted to
Guardian
In 2013, the South African artist Adam Broomberg, who has carried out work to highlight this, explained it by pointing out that “if you show the film to a white child, a black child sitting next to him would become invisible, except for the whites of his eyes and teeth.” This is close to what Leger emphasizes out of concern: a growing interest among white photographers in “that aesthetic of obscuring the person so that only their eyes can be seen, because it can be deeply insulting to us.”
“Who protects black people? And all the intersectionality that our lives require? If we all disappeared, who would remember us?” asks Pica Sullivan, the protagonist of
Drylongso
,
a film by African-American director Cauleen Smith released in 1998. Pica thus referred to the constant violence between murders at the hands of the police and deaths from overdoses to which black communities were exposed. Filmed with a 16 millimeter camera, the film follows the steps of this young black art student as she walks the streets of her city, Oakland, photographing racialized young men. Cauleen finds in photography the best way to preserve the existence of all of them, and through them her own community, because she fears oblivion. The camera that accompanies it to avoid this is, precisely and paradoxically, a Polaroid.
Four years earlier, in 1994, Kodak finally introduced new women's faces (the new Shirleys, as they called them) that served to reconstruct the standard, this time, with different skin tones. But by then digital photography was close, and with it the continuation of a legacy that those cards did not settle. A month ago, Leger says, two girls came to her studio so she could photograph them. They were friends, both Basque, but one of Congolese descent and the other Tunisian. “When I set out to photograph them, the digital camera I work with collected certain information for one that it did not collect for the other. Of course, when the blackest girl's turn came, he had to modify her background and illuminate her more. But she insists: “If you know how to do it it will only take you a few more minutes, so there are no excuses. We must use the same technology that has defined us to change it and, to do so, we must be present.”
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