The original photography and cinematography lighting techniques and practices we teach were initially conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people and white skin. This may not have been on purpose, but it was an exclusionary factor. The clearest example of this is the ‘Shirley Card’
Example of a Kodak Shirley card (1978) courtesy of Hermann Zschiegner
For many years, this “Shirley” card — named for the original model, who was an employee of Kodak — was used by photo labs to calibrate skin tones, shadows and light during the printing process.
The Shirley card was the standard, so when film processors printed anything, they had to pull Shirley in. If Shirley looked good, everything else was OK. If Shirley didn’t look so hot that day, they had to tweak something as it was seen as incorrect.
Shirley cards go back to the mid-1950s, a time when Kodak sold almost all of the color film used in the U.S. After a customer used the film, they would bring the roll to a Kodak store to be printed. In 1954, the federal government stepped in to break up Kodak’s monopoly.
“The people who were producing the cards had a particular image of beauty, captured in the Shirley card,” says Lorna Roth, a media professor at Canada’s Concordia University who has researched the history of Kodak’s Shirley cards.
“At the time, in the ’50s, the people who were buying cameras were mostly Caucasian people,” she says. “And so I guess they didn’t see the need for the market to expand to a broader range of skin tones.” According to Roth, the dynamic range of the film — both still photo stock and motion picture — was biased toward white skin.
In the mid-20th century, Kodak dismissed complaints from Black mothers about their colour film’s inability to properly capture dark skin tones in their children’s desegregated school photos, reflecting the broader societal biases of the time. It wasn’t until Kodak’s corporate clients—specifically furniture and chocolate companies—demanded better representation of dark hues for their products that Kodak began to address the issue. By the late 1970s, Kodak introduced a more inclusive film formulation, signalled subtly through marketing phrases such as the new film had the ability to take a picture of a “dark horse in low light.” This poetic phrase was code to signal that darker human skin could now be registered with this new film.
Image from book jacket for Now Is the Time: Integration in the Berkeley Schools by Neil Sullivan with Evelyn Steward, 1969
In 1978, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film to shoot in Mozambique because he declared the film was racist. People also complained that photos of blacks and whites in the same shot would turn out partially under- or over-exposed.
In the 1970s, photographer Jim Lyon joined Kodak’s first photo tech division and research laboratories. He says the company recognized there was a problem with the all-white Shirley cards.
“I started incorporating black models pretty heavily in our testing, and it caught on very quickly,” he says. “It wasn’t a big deal, it just seemed like this is the right thing to do. I wasn’t attempting to be politically correct. I was just trying to give us a chance of making a better film, one that reproduced everybody’s skin tone in an appropriate way.”
By then, other film companies had their own versions of Shirley cards, and Kodak started making multiracial norm reference cards with Black, Asian, Latinx and white Shirleys. Then came digital photography. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012 and re-emerged as a much smaller technology company. By then, it had already stopped making Shirley cards.
References:
Pyne, B. and manager, R.P.L. general (2014). How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard. [online] NPR.org. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard.
Lewis, S. (2019). The Racial Bias Built Into Photography. The New York Times. [online] 25 Apr. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html.
Ramirez, A. (2020). How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias. [online] Time. Available at: https://time.com/5871502/film-race-history/.
www.berkeleyschools.net. (2018). 50th Anniversary of Berkeley’s Pioneering Busing Plan for School Integration | Berkeley Unified School District. [online] Available at: https://www.berkeleyschools.net/2018/12/50th-anniversary-of-berkeleys-pioneering-busing-plan-for-school-integration/.