Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin.

The unfortunate history of racial bias in photography. Subscribe today: For decades, the color film available to consumers was built for white people. The chemicals coating the film simply weren’t adequate to capture a diversity of darker skin tones. And the photo labs established in the 1940s and 50s even used an image of a white woman, called a Shirley card, to calibrate the colors for printing. Concordia University professor Lorna Roth has researched the evolution of skin tone im