BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And I’m Brooke Gladstone. We just heard from a photographer who blames himself for failing to move the public when it mattered, with his camera. But what if the camera itself is partially to blame? What if the instrument used to capture reality’s various hues has a bias of its own? This is an ad for Kodak from 1988.

  [CLIP]:

ANNOUNCER:  The world’s great pictures are trusted to one film - Kodak. Why trust your memories to anything less?

  [MUSIC][END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But it turned out Kodak film couldn’t be trusted to capture all our true colors. Photographer   Syreeta McFadden wrote in BuzzFeed this week that after her family sat for a group photo, she learned that the camera just couldn’t see dark skin.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  It was a big deal to go to this photo studio. It was in a completely different side of town, and my mom had saved up, planned our outfits. She wanted to get a proper family photo, as every mother would want to get. As a four-person family, my mother, my father, my younger sister and myself, we’re varying skin tones but not so wildly off from each other. And then when the proofs came back, I hated every single one. I don’t know if it was the background, I don't know if it was the choice of clothing we wore, but something looked off. My mom is a little bit washed out and then me, I'm kind of off-sight in shadow, my eyes totally obliterated.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Your face just sort of disappeared into kind of a muddy murk.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yes. I heard similar things of folks feeling disappointed with portraits that they sat for or school photos. Brown tones seemed flattened to some sort of kind of washed out blob. I really became interested in how can I do this better. I could probably do this better.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And what you found out essentially was that the problem wasn't so much that the photographer was Caucasian, but that – the film was! [LAUGHS]

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  [LAUGHS] Which is probably the most elegant distillation ever, yes. It turned out that the film technologies that we were utilizing at the time in like the 60s, 70s, 80s, even up to the 90s, pretty much had been calibrated towards Caucasian skin tones.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  To Shirley.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Shirley was a model working for Kodak in the beginning of them developing color film stocks for nonprofessional use. She’s a Caucasian woman dressed in high- contrast clothing who became the reference card for technicians and developers to calibrate how they would print color film stock. The first model was named Shirley. It kind of just stuck. 

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The film was calibrated to pick up lights and darks in a particular range, and so, if you weren't in that contrast zone, you wouldn't be seen.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  You wouldn’t be seen. Eventually, when other companies started to utilize the color film for advertising their products, they discovered that the film’s limited range also flattened their products. So that is when we start to see a shift in Kodak actually developing and enhancing that technology, to try and read a wider variety of not only chocolate but skin tones.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  What did photographers do before? Photographers had been dealing with it.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Right. Everyone did it differently. If you look at Gordon Parks, for primarily his entire photo career everything is in black and white. You don't have the problem with the grayscale, so the grayscale you get the most dimension and storytelling. Somehow, we’re able to evoke nuances about shades of brown and mood through the grayscale.

One of the things that I thought was problematic about color film is that it flattened us. Like, if we’re distorted in images and those images are basically consumed by our culture, then perhaps this actually kind of shifts and adjusts the narrative of how people see us. There’s a limit of imagination, in terms of understanding black and brown identities in our culture. You know, just how darker-skinned people have been represented in images over, you know, decades, we’re still kind in this dialogue of trying to understand or fully see each other.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And the tendency to de-individualize black skin on film was noted by Jean Luc Godard.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yeah, in 1977, no less. He was commissioned by the Mozambique government to shoot some work for them. He refused to use Kodak film stock. He’s noted that it does not render a defined blackness on those emulsions, which basically would flatten identity, would basically represent everyone as a mob.

What I love about the work now, with the modernization technology and certainly our awareness, is that we’re able to capture a wider range of darker skin tones, able to capture details; we’re able to capture undertones. McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a tough film to watch, but what's amazing is the way the enslaved Africans are lit and rendered. We get to see the nuances and varieties. There’s a, there’s a beautiful humanization of their personhood that is absent in our visual language of enslaved Africans from centuries before and how they were betrayed by the camera.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But you've also noted that there are some risks encoded in the digital photography, the point-and-shoot cameras that we use?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yeah. All the cameras are calibrated differently. In 2010, there’s this one image that went viral that this young woman posted about Nikon’s Coolpix camera, which is made up of like a set of like smart technologies, to give you the opportunity to recapture your moment if you blinked because the flash burst, then we’ll give you an opportunity to take the picture again, so you can get your perfect shot.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  So the images that’s going around is a screen shot of saying, wait, did someone blink, and she’s like, “No, I’m just Asian.”

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

The sensors must have been calibrated to the contours of a white face, of a Caucasian face. It didn't take into account the variety of faces.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Are you taking pictures now in black and white or color?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  I do shoot in color because I have control now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Can you tell me, when there was a moment when you –

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Mm-hmm -

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  - as a photographer just couldn't get what you wanted?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  There was definitely an instance when I did some head shots in probably the like most ideal light situation. The client wanted these images in color, and it still didn’t read right. I think that's probably the official time that I broke up with Kodak forever, and that’s when I started talking to photographers about other film stocks that I could try. And one of them suggested to me Fujichrome, Fuji Provia, actually, a very specific color film stock of slide film from Fuji that was gorgeous. And then I started playing around with cross-processing it. That basically entails taking a roll of color slide film and then running it through E6 and then C41. E6 is the kind of developer you use to develop slide film, so it becomes a positive image and then you do C41 and it becomes a negative image. And those two processes skewed the color in a way that favored darker skin. Even if the colors are not true to how we experience it, there's something beautifully compelling and a richness and a vibrancy that was very powerful for me, and I was thrilled to shoot it that way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Syreeta, thank you so much.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Syreeta McFadden is a writer and photographer. Her piece in BuzzFeed is called, “Teaching The Camera To See My Skin.”

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And I’m Brooke Gladstone. We just heard from a photographer who blames himself for failing to move the public when it mattered, with his camera. But what if the camera itself is partially to blame? What if the instrument used to capture reality’s various hues has a bias of its own? This is an ad for Kodak from 1988.

  [CLIP]:

ANNOUNCER:  The world’s great pictures are trusted to one film - Kodak. Why trust your memories to anything less?

  [MUSIC][END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But it turned out Kodak film couldn’t be trusted to capture all our true colors. Photographer   Syreeta McFadden wrote in BuzzFeed this week that after her family sat for a group photo, she learned that the camera just couldn’t see dark skin.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  It was a big deal to go to this photo studio. It was in a completely different side of town, and my mom had saved up, planned our outfits. She wanted to get a proper family photo, as every mother would want to get. As a four-person family, my mother, my father, my younger sister and myself, we’re varying skin tones but not so wildly off from each other. And then when the proofs came back, I hated every single one. I don’t know if it was the background, I don't know if it was the choice of clothing we wore, but something looked off. My mom is a little bit washed out and then me, I'm kind of off-sight in shadow, my eyes totally obliterated.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Your face just sort of disappeared into kind of a muddy murk.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yes. I heard similar things of folks feeling disappointed with portraits that they sat for or school photos. Brown tones seemed flattened to some sort of kind of washed out blob. I really became interested in how can I do this better. I could probably do this better.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And what you found out essentially was that the problem wasn't so much that the photographer was Caucasian, but that – the film was! [LAUGHS]

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  [LAUGHS] Which is probably the most elegant distillation ever, yes. It turned out that the film technologies that we were utilizing at the time in like the 60s, 70s, 80s, even up to the 90s, pretty much had been calibrated towards Caucasian skin tones.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  To Shirley.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Shirley was a model working for Kodak in the beginning of them developing color film stocks for nonprofessional use. She’s a Caucasian woman dressed in high- contrast clothing who became the reference card for technicians and developers to calibrate how they would print color film stock. The first model was named Shirley. It kind of just stuck. 

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The film was calibrated to pick up lights and darks in a particular range, and so, if you weren't in that contrast zone, you wouldn't be seen.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  You wouldn’t be seen. Eventually, when other companies started to utilize the color film for advertising their products, they discovered that the film’s limited range also flattened their products. So that is when we start to see a shift in Kodak actually developing and enhancing that technology, to try and read a wider variety of not only chocolate but skin tones.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  What did photographers do before? Photographers had been dealing with it.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Right. Everyone did it differently. If you look at Gordon Parks, for primarily his entire photo career everything is in black and white. You don't have the problem with the grayscale, so the grayscale you get the most dimension and storytelling. Somehow, we’re able to evoke nuances about shades of brown and mood through the grayscale.

One of the things that I thought was problematic about color film is that it flattened us. Like, if we’re distorted in images and those images are basically consumed by our culture, then perhaps this actually kind of shifts and adjusts the narrative of how people see us. There’s a limit of imagination, in terms of understanding black and brown identities in our culture. You know, just how darker-skinned people have been represented in images over, you know, decades, we’re still kind in this dialogue of trying to understand or fully see each other.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And the tendency to de-individualize black skin on film was noted by Jean Luc Godard.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yeah, in 1977, no less. He was commissioned by the Mozambique government to shoot some work for them. He refused to use Kodak film stock. He’s noted that it does not render a defined blackness on those emulsions, which basically would flatten identity, would basically represent everyone as a mob.

What I love about the work now, with the modernization technology and certainly our awareness, is that we’re able to capture a wider range of darker skin tones, able to capture details; we’re able to capture undertones. McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a tough film to watch, but what's amazing is the way the enslaved Africans are lit and rendered. We get to see the nuances and varieties. There’s a, there’s a beautiful humanization of their personhood that is absent in our visual language of enslaved Africans from centuries before and how they were betrayed by the camera.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But you've also noted that there are some risks encoded in the digital photography, the point-and-shoot cameras that we use?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Yeah. All the cameras are calibrated differently. In 2010, there’s this one image that went viral that this young woman posted about Nikon’s Coolpix camera, which is made up of like a set of like smart technologies, to give you the opportunity to recapture your moment if you blinked because the flash burst, then we’ll give you an opportunity to take the picture again, so you can get your perfect shot.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  So the images that’s going around is a screen shot of saying, wait, did someone blink, and she’s like, “No, I’m just Asian.”

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

The sensors must have been calibrated to the contours of a white face, of a Caucasian face. It didn't take into account the variety of faces.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Are you taking pictures now in black and white or color?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  I do shoot in color because I have control now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Can you tell me, when there was a moment when you –

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Mm-hmm -

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  - as a photographer just couldn't get what you wanted?

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  There was definitely an instance when I did some head shots in probably the like most ideal light situation. The client wanted these images in color, and it still didn’t read right. I think that's probably the official time that I broke up with Kodak forever, and that’s when I started talking to photographers about other film stocks that I could try. And one of them suggested to me Fujichrome, Fuji Provia, actually, a very specific color film stock of slide film from Fuji that was gorgeous. And then I started playing around with cross-processing it. That basically entails taking a roll of color slide film and then running it through E6 and then C41. E6 is the kind of developer you use to develop slide film, so it becomes a positive image and then you do C41 and it becomes a negative image. And those two processes skewed the color in a way that favored darker skin. Even if the colors are not true to how we experience it, there's something beautifully compelling and a richness and a vibrancy that was very powerful for me, and I was thrilled to shoot it that way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Syreeta, thank you so much.

SYREETA MCFADDEN:  Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Syreeta McFadden is a writer and photographer. Her piece in BuzzFeed is called, “Teaching The Camera To See My Skin.”