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When Cameras Can't See: Tracing the Racial DNA in Colour Film

This piece was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.


A person and child stand before a giant camera, holding a portrait. A film reel emerges, suggesting nostalgia and memories.
Illustration by Mukta Nitin Desai

Today, you can flick through various filters on your device and use presets like ‘Retro’or ‘Soft glow’ to enhance your image or adjust the saturation, contrast, and brightness to best suit your liking. However, when colour film in cameras was first invented to truly reflect reality, it failed to accurately capture the features or skin tone of brown-skinned individuals. 


Going through her childhood album, Syreeta McFadden, photographer and scholar, stopped cold. She noticed her skin appeared “black-blue” in those images despite her natural brown complexion. She could barely recognise herself. This was not an isolated incident—it was part of a bigger failure built into the DNA of colour film, and many such distortions were experienced around the 1950s in North America. Soon, photography didn’t just entail distortions in photo albums, but extended into systems of power and control.  


The roots of this phenomenon lie in the introduction of Kodachrome, the first coloured film introduced in 1935 by Kodak, which revolutionised photographic technology. It was designed to capture light-skinned individuals, as they were the larger consumer base at the time.


As the popularity of photography and the demand to print coloured images grew, photo labs needed faster and more standardised processing methods. 


Thus, to achieve a quicker printing process, the Shirley Card was born. This card was a reference image, featuring only a few colour swatches and a picture of a white woman named Shirley Page. It would then be shipped across North America, guiding photo technicians to compare and adjust all printed images according to the colour balance of the Shirley Card, ensuring that they would look correct.


The fallout from this development is foundational to the socio-cultural embedding of colour biases in photography. Over time, several versions of these cards were produced featuring women with similar light skin tones, often dressed in contrasting coloured garments like red, to aid calibration. 


Scholars like Rosa Wevers refer to this tendency as the “Normativity of Whiteness,” suggesting that Shirley Card reaffirmed light skin as the default or the ‘standard.’ These cards have slowly cemented a narrow visual benchmark that lasted decades. 


Later, in the 1990s, Kodak’s introduction of an improved and dynamic product range was sparked purely by the interest of commerce, with no regard for its cultural implications. It wasn't the diversity of skin tones that was the catalyst for change; rather, it was the chocolate and furniture industries, such as the Mahogany Association Inc., that became the trailblazers, pushing for corrections in the technology. They were deeply disappointed with how the rich tones of brown tones of their products were depicted as dull or indistinguishable in photos. Soon, they filed a complaint with Kodak. The company had to adapt before it lost its business with these industries and introduced films like the Gold Max. 


Direct interviews by Lorna Roth, a researcher of Shirley Cards, with the Kodak engineers and managers were enlightening. In these interviews, Kathy Conor, a Kodak executive, implied that the need for change was not seriously acknowledged until the complaints began to threaten Kodak’s business relationships. 


In effect, this acknowledgement implicitly marginalised a significant portion of the consumer base during the development of this product. This is also revealed by the fact that efforts to expand its dynamic range in the 90s were not driven by concerns of skin tone accuracy, but by profit motives and complaints filed by these companies.


While examining the cause of these issues, technical limitations must also be considered, such as the film’s limited dynamic range of colour balance and emulsion, designed to respond to mid-tones and, in turn, the white skin tone of individuals.


At the same time, it’s helpful to look at the historical and social context in which colour film technology was developed. Together, the combination of the consumer market and technical requirements shaped critical decisions about its design and calibration. These choices have contributed to the underpinning of racial biases in photography.


What seemed like technical and design shortcomings soon translated into distortions of those photographed. 


Brown skin was often printed as green, blue or sometimes even dark grey. Whole faces and striking features were blurred, disappearing into the shadow. What was lost wasn’t just the colour of the images, but also the details of beauty and personality that were lost with colour. Essentially, cameras with these films were unable to fulfil their fundamental purpose: to reflect reality.


Film-maker Jean-Luc Godard even refused to use Kodachrome film to shoot in Mozambique because of how racist he found it to be.


In the world of visual culture, commercials predominantly featured subjects with lighter skin, the racist DNA of cameras being one of the leading causes. Light-skinned individuals were better exposed to the light to be captured by the film, reproducing their features accurately. And while these decisions can be attributed to the objectivity of photography technology, what stands out is how this ultimately contributed to the vicious cycle of social exclusion, perpetuating stereotypes and cementing negative social attitudes towards diverse communities.


The normativity of whiteness was also constructed on the foundations of racial structures shaped by centuries of slavery and colonialism. Colonial powers portrayed individuals with dark skin as less developed to justify exploitation, while making whiteness a social ideal. 


And what began as a social standard in advertising and cinematography soon transcended into a tool of power in politics, where cameras not only set the marks for beauty, but were also used to control populations. 


During the apartheid in South Africa (1948-1994), the Polaroid ID-2 camera was used in the process of state control. This camera had a ‘boost button’ to increase the flash and make darker skin tones visible in photos. The very presence of a boost button is indicative of how the original model was never designed with darker-skinned subjects in mind. 


The images were then used in documents called ‘Pass Book’, which was a tool used to monitor and restrict the movement of black South Africans. These documents were required to be carried everywhere, recording and dictating the movement of those individuals to limited-access areas. Cameras were silent witnesses to this, being instrumentalised to maintain racial systems. 


This bias did not stop at North America and South Africa. In other parts of the world, the technical shortcomings of the camera intersected with the pre-colonial legacies that privileged lighter complexions over darker complexions. 


India in the 1950s imported its colour film from companies like Kodak and Afga. These film stocks' tonal ranges optimised subjects of lighter skin, and generally had a part to play in selecting subjects with lighter skin tone for the TV screen. This played a crucial role in solidifying whiteness as the unspoken benchmark for beauty in the Indian visual world.


Decades later, the legacy of Kodak’s Shirley Cards and cameras like the Polaroid ID-2 still lingers. Since photography at that time rewarded light-skinned subjects with accurate representation and made them the standard, the result was a media landscape of advertisements and movies where that skin tone became synonymous with beauty and aspiration. 


Presently, this legacy shapes the decisions of cosmetics and beauty products such as Fenty Beauty and its Pro Filtr Foundation, which challenge these old notions and cater to a broad spectrum of skin tones. A single filter in editing apps does more for skin than decades of Kodak innovation ever did too. 


Even as practical constraints play a role in shaping who and how we photograph, photographers around the globe recognise beauty in all subjects, embracing their diversity and subverting old practices by using adaptive lighting and careful editing. 


However, remembering this legacy matters because an object as mundane as a camera is assumed to be apolitical and purely functional. A camera is supposed to capture the truth, yet it was also a technology that helped perpetuate racial biases in culture. 


By unpacking something as ordinary as the creation of the colour film and the myth of its neutrality, the camera is exposed for what it was: a tool that helped decide whose features matter and who it would misrepresent. 


Since the objectivity of technology helped set the stage for beauty standards and racial inequalities, which remain contested, the sharper question to ask is: if cameras were developed to capture every skin tone from the start, would we still chase fallible standards of beauty rooted deeply in race, or would the very ‘image’ of humanity have looked entirely different?



Edited by the Curated Editorial Team


Aisha (she/her) is a Global Affairs student at the Jindal School of International Affairs and a writer at Political Pandora. Her interests lie in global elections, international conflicts, and exploring how different media formats influence societal culture, values, practices, and perspectives.



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Keywords: Camera Racism, Colour Bias, Kodak Racism, Photography Bias, Racial Discrimination, Skin Representation, Beauty Politics, Media Whiteness, Dark Skin, Photo Technology, Cultural Racism, Visual Inequality, Skin Accuracy, Film Colour, Image Bias, Visual Standards, Racial Beauty, Filter Effects, Diversity Photography, Historical Racism

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