Skin in the frame: black photographers welcome Google initiative | Photography

Christina Ebenezer first started taking photos with a group of friends when she was a 17-year-old student. Even then, she noticed the difference in how her camera captured people of different skin tones.

“I didn’t think much about this until I got older and became more experienced in photography. It was when I learned that the early Kodak Vericolor Shirley Cards were based on various white women that I thought OK, this was an industry standard that was not made with people like me in mind,” Ebenezer, who has photographed for British Vogue, British GQ, and Vanity Fair, said.

Kodak’s Shirley Cards were used by photo labs for calibrating skin tones, shadows and light in photographs. The card, named after the original model who worked for Kodak, ensured Shirley looked good, to the detriment of people with darker skin colour.

Kodak Shirley Card. Photograph: Kodak

Robert Taylor, who has been a photographer for 30 years, remembers working with “well-intentioned white photographers who had plainly done their best, but just hadn’t got to grips with the technical and aesthetic challenges of doing black people and black skin right”.

Taylor, whose work is held in several permanent collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Royal Society, added: “And in some cases, the settings and the choices of how things are set up in analogue as well as in digital just didn’t work as well with dark skin.”

It is this bias that Google’s…

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