Social Snapshots: The Racial Bias Built Into Photography

Throughout my artistic career I have always had an affinity for portrait photography. Whether those portraits are for someone else's project or for my own experimentation, I felt that the beauty in this realm of photography was that anyone could become the subject and tell their own story. Photography is a universal language, and there is value in having everyone heard and seen. But as obvious as this message seems to myself and others who share the same beliefs as me, photography has has a history of racially impartial selectivity towards both models and photographers. This unconscious bias stems from the fact that photography itself has considered white skin and white tones as the norm  for professional photographers throughout history, inadvertently influencing our standards of what we consider a "good photo."

In the New York Times article I read regarding this issue, Sarah Lewis, an author who has experienced these racial biases when being photographed, explains how "Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions." She goes on to describe how in the very rudimentary stages of film photography, white skin was the chemical baseline for film technology, as the market for photography at the time was primarily white. As absurd as this sounds, technicians who developed these photos used a photo of a white woman named Shirley as a standard of color to calibrate colors in undeveloped film. What this means is that in photographs with both light and dark skinned people, the tones of light-skinned people determined whether the photograph was a good or bad one; as long as the fair-skinned people looked good, the photograph looked good. 

While companies like Kodak in the 1990s attempted to fix this issue in the of having white as the standard, many photographers moved onto digital photography while still retaining this biased standard. Color correction became easier, but preference in the eye of photographer for what looked good stayed relatively the same. However, the catalyst for companies to change their tone priority did not stem from a progressive social movement, bur rather from large corporations in which darker tone priority was a necessity. Chocolate companies claimed that they “weren’t getting the right brown tones on the chocolates” in photographs of their products. Furniture companies claimed that they "were not getting enough variation between the different color woods in their advertisements." While these companies eventually made a change in the photography industry, it was not due to the inalienable necessity to be represented in this constantly evolving realm of art.

Currently, digital photography has led to some advancement of countering this racial bias; however the technological foundation for digital photography still retains white tones as the standard. With dual skin-tone color-balancing and image-stabilization, multiracial photography has never been easier. But introduce artificial light into the camera sensor and now the camera is unable to pick up darker tones. And while many Researchers at MIT Media Lab have been advocating to correct the algorithmic bias that exists in digital imaging technology, these photograph parameters have already defined the standard of a photo in a photographers eyes.

The issue at hand that needs to be addressed by photographers like me is changing what we believe is a good photograph whether one believes that they are racially biased or not. One has to reconsider what they claim is a good photo to fully understand why a lighter photo of a darker person is more appealing to the eye. Rather than changing the technology, we have to change our standard.

NY Times Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html

Portrait of Divine and Gabby