cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/331921
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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The early cameras were insensitive to all colours. That's why you had to stand still for a long time to have your picture taken. I don't know what specific process you're talking about that is insensitive to red light specifically, nor why that would be problem for dark skin specifically, when both Caucasian and African skin types tend to reflect more red than other colours of light, making it a matter of exposure, not colour.
Happy to be shown wrong.
Silver iodide plates don’t respond to red light. They respond better to blue and violet. That alone doesn’t cause the problem but it’s part of it. I can’t remember where I read that tho
Without special lighting black people became a dark void. You could photograph them with special lighting and different techniques but that mostly wasn’t done.
So I think it’s fair to say it didn’t work well for darker skin tones because in order to get a picture with similar quality you had to work a lot harder.
I do agree in the later days it was more a specific caused by racism but from the beginning it was more difficult to photograph darker skin tones and no one really cared because of racism. I wasn’t caused by the racism tho. It was caused by the technology at that time… that no one cared enough to fix it.
That mentality carried on until I believe the Kodachrome made all the world a sunny day. I’m not an expert tho.
Here’s a quick picture with a squirming white child (moving) and a still black woman. You can still make out more features in the white child. I’m assuming as well this was done by a professional who did his best to make both people clear.
Maybe it’s just my eyesight tho.
I don't think this is a limitation of the photographic process though. A higher exposure would reveal more detail in the woman's face. The child is correctly exposed, but the picture could still be pushed and retain detail in the child's face - so I'd guess that this is a choice by the photographer. If the woman is a slave or servant, the picture could well be of the child and so the photographer would have no reason to prioritise exposing for the woman's face.
One smaller point - the woman's clothes are over-exposed - at least from the look of this digital reproduction. I don't really think it's likely that was a factor, but it tells you about the dynamic range available.
Just to be explicit, taking photographs of your children being held by a black nanny and not caring whether the nanny is properly visible in the photo reveals some kind of prejudice in the person deciding on the photo, and it could well be evidence of a racist system in which black people are slaves, servants or other "lesser" positions in society, I am just not convinced that we are seeing any racist impact on the science of photography.
It’s racism in the sense I mentioned. It was tested and built around white people. It didn’t work as well on black people (requires more work, gear, and technique to get similar results). No one was in any real hurry to fix that.
I might have been hyperbolic with features void. But yeah it was a problem. That should have taught us that this problem would come in ai.