Hello there! Hope your day is going well!
Yesterday I was looking for good reference photos to use for practice at rendering darker skintones, and I noticed a lot of the same kind of racial bias photography pitfalls happening that made so many photos 'bad' photos to use as ref material, to the point that my friends helped me put together a guide on how to determine if a photo is a good photo to use as reference material when it comes to darker skintones.
I thought sharing it with you and your followers would be a good idea!
Example of a good vs bad photo reference (of the same model ie Khoudia Diop) below and why:
The good reference photo aka the left photo: balanced neutral lighting, good exposure, good range of values across her face, nothing is overly washed out or in shadow, the variance of undertones in her skin are visible, and the whites of her eyes and highlights of her face don't overtake the rest of her skin in prominence.
The bad reference photo: the white balance is shifted to focus on the details of her white outfit, and so her face and hair are underexposed. This flattens her face so that it appears as just a few muddied desaturated dark tones, while her teeth and highlights starkly pop out from the darkness. If you aren't zooming in to see the details, it all blends together in a disappointing flatness. This photo does this Black model a disservice, as the photographer and/or editor did not take the time and effort to re-balance the values so that her face would be exposed properly.
Photography, like every other facet of life, has problems of racial bias. Kodak didn't even start accommodating for rich darker skintones because Black families complained about how their photos developed; it was furniture and chocolate companies complaining that the color film couldn't properly capture the differences of their light brown and dark brown products that finally pushed Kodak to change their film color formulations to better depict the darker browns necessary to render dark skin. The history of photography and color film is quite interesting, just as the history of racial bias in the artform is depressing.
There's a short video from Vox that talks about the subject.
The full guide I put together can be found here if you wanna see and/or share it. I hope it is helpful.
Thank you for your time and I hope you have a pleasant day!
Khoudia!! I wanted one of her smiling that was still nice. Her teeth contrasting her skin is not necessarily a bad thing, that's not something she can help, and she should always smile! I love seeing her skin shade in the sun, it really is a beautiful dark. But for sure, every time they take pictures of her outside, they never do right by her skin tone. Oh, the modeling industry! Thanks for sharing your guide!
@modelsof-color do you have some pieces for Khoudia?
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