This is a Shirley card.
And if you developed color film between the
1940s and the 1990s
the accuracy of the colors in your photos
was largely based on this skin-tone.
Shirley was probably the the name of the first
person who was pictured on the cards.
And Shirley became the subsequent name of
the all of the people pictured on the cards.
That's Lorna Roth, a professor and researcher
at Concordia University in Montreal.
She's been studying race, representation,
and technology for well over 20 years.
Usually they were very white women who wore
very colorful dresses.
Color film works like this.
There are layers of chemicals stacked on each
other that are sensitive to different colors
of light and there are a series of different
types of chemical solutions that are used
to
develop them once exposed to that light.
A combination of all of these chemicals creates
a film's color balance and for many decades
chemicals that would bring out various reddish,
yellow, and brown tones were largely left
out.
The consumer market that was designated in
the design of film chemistry was that of a
lighter skinned market.
So, when defining what an idealized skin tone
would be, it turned out to be a lighter skin
tone than a darker skin tone.
It wasn't until the 1970s where things started
to change.
Companies that were advertising different
kinds of wood furnitures were complaining
that
Kodak film did not render the difference between
dark grained wood and light grained wood.
The other companies that Kodak responded to
were chocolate makers
because the film couldn't render the difference
between dark and milk chocolate.
If you want to sell in the global marketplace,
you can't just have whiteness as the dominant
basis for your technologies.
As the film and television industries became
more diverse,
color balance issues at the professional level
became more apparent
and in the 1990s a team of designers at Philips
in Breda, Holland tackled the issue head on
by developing a camera system that used two
different computer chips to balance lighter
and darker skin tones individually.
The first people to buy these cameras, they
were called the LDK series, were Oprah Winfrey
and Black Entertainment Television.
People who were very aware of these issues.
It was around this time that the White Shirley
card was joined by the black Shirley card,
the Latino Shirley card, and the multiracial
Shirley card.
And Kodak's Gold Max marketing campaign
emphasized their film's improved dynamic
range.
If you were his parents would you trust this
moment to anything other than Kodak Gold Film?
No other film in the world gives you truer
color than Kodak Gold.
Today color film and digital camera sensors
have a much broader dynamic range,
but the default towards lighter skin in technology
still lingers.
Digital sensors, for the most part, still
look for the lightest area of the frame and
automatically calibrate to that.
One of the big mistakes emerged in 2009. I'm
sure you heard about it.
My co-worker Wanda and I are sitting in front
of an HP media smart computer.
It's supposed to follow me as I move. I'm
black.
I think my blackness is interfering with my
computer's ability to follow me.
So she moved this way, and the camera followed
her.
And then he would get into the screen and
it would be completely stable.
No face recognition anymore buddy!
The 
fact is, there is still a cultural bias towards
lighter skin, certainly in how we use technology,
and sometimes, still, within the technology
itself.
It was when I was talking to Bryan Harris
at the Black Entertainment Television network
in the U.S. when he said,
'You know color film could have been developed
very differently had black people developed
it they would've taken very different factors
into consideration.'
And of course, he's right.
Technology should be the ultimate equalizer.
It should serve everyone's needs without
an inherent bias.
If a child is born into a society where all
of the range of skin tones is the obvious
norm, than they could no longer assume that
whiteness is the default.
