Quoth

Pulled from WestIndians.tumblr.com:-

The way that racism operates aesthetically is to neglect or, in extreme cases, erase whoever is not white. In the 1950s, for example, Kodak measured and calibrated skin tones in still photography using a reference card featuring “Shirley,” a white model dressed in high-contrast clothing. Ultimately, Shirley ended up being the standard for image processing in North American photography labs. It didn’t matter if the photo in question contained entirely black people; Shirley’s complexion was still treated as the ideal.

Kodak’s film was so bad at capturing the different hues and saturations of black skin that when director Jean Luc Godard was sent on an assignment to Mozambique in 1977, he flat-out refused to use Kodak on the grounds that its stock was “racist.” Only when the candy and furniture industries began complaining that they couldn’t accurately shoot dark chocolate and brown wood furniture did Kodak start to improve its technology.

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— Morgan Jerkins, The Quiet Racism of Instagram Filters

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