If you’re anyone in an industry working with photography and imagery, it’s not news that historically cameras were never designed to capture people of color. For decades, people of color were either systematically removed or misrepresented in history. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when Chocolate and Furniture companies complained about their products not presenting accurate brown shades in film images that Kodak started working on film development techniques to be able to calibrate the colors for darker skin-tones.
Technicolor, in the early 1950s, replaced black and white photography to colored photography for the first time. The attention it garnered lead to the mass (mostly white) public being able to immortalise memories in color for the first time.
It was Kodak who provides labs and photo processing services with ‘Shirley Card’, a reference card which helped labs in maintaining and calibrating consistent colors.
The problem was, the Shirley Card was an image of a pale white skin woman with light eyes and hair. Not a single feature that would match a person of non-white ethnicity. Which, as you guessed it, lead to inaccurate representation of people of color.
It was in 1990s, when Kodak created multiracial Shirley Card which included a black and an asian woman along with a white woman. Much after the complains from chocolate and furniture companies for inaccuracies in their product imagery. Though rendered quite useless with the growing popularity of digital camera in the same era. If one infers that accurate representation of these products were more important than those of black and brown people, you wouldn’t be so wrong
We’re well in the 21st century, and there still exists photographers that have a hard time capturing people of color. After a certain point, the onus is on the technician using the equipment rather than the equipment itself.