DARK FILTERS FOR PHOTOS SKIN

Bottom: D's photo before and after the Amaro filter. Top: J's photo before and after the Lark filter. 'I don't really think filters give you much of a choice but to be at least a little lighter.' 'Nothing about looking at these pictures surprises me,' she said. But then again, isn't that the objective? Instagram did in fact state that the Reyes filter gives 'a dusty, vintage look.' Since traditional photography used a white woman as the prototype, M's 'new' image is a direct reflection of this exaltation of the white body, and the consequent denigration of the black body.Īnd Z, a woman of Haitian descent, appreciated how the filters cleared her dark circles and blemishes on her face, but she wished that her color was retained. Instead, it erases these shades and mutes them so that the final product is an image that leans more towards whiteness. What the Instagram filter fails to grasp is the different shades of brown in and around M's forehead, down her cheeks, and above her top lip. If someone didn't know me, they could mistake me for being much more fair skinned than I am. The colors of my lipstick and dress are very muted, and I look entirely too bright.

When I asked M what she thought her filtered image, she replied, 'Ew. However, when M, an African-American woman, applied the Reyes filter to her original image, the result was astounding. 'If someone didn't know me, they could mistake me for being much more fair skinned than I am. Still, most American film stocks were not built by or made for people of color, so what does this mean for Instagram, which prides itself on allowing its users to filter photos so that they look like they were taken from a Polaroid or Kodak? Kodak is now bankrupt, but is Instagram continuing its predecessor's myopic vision?

DARK FILTERS FOR PHOTOS SKIN

And in a Washington Post article about lighting black skin in the movies, Montré Aza Missouri, an assistant professor of Film at Howard University, explains how she teaches her students that 'the tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral.' Missouri says there are ways to illuminate the complexity of darker skin tones without over-saturating them, such as opening a camera's apertures one or two notches to allow for more light to permeate the lens so that it reflect off the subject's skin. In a BuzzFeed essay, Syreeta McFadden details how she primarily photographs in color, using cross-processing slide film in order to subvert the light-dark skin bias. The way that racism operates aesthetically is to neglect or, in extreme cases, erase whoever is not white.įortunately, today photographers and cinematographers are working to better represent people of color. It didn't matter if the photo in question contained entirely black people Shirley's complexion was still treated as the ideal. Ultimately, Shirley ended up being the standard for image processing in North American photography labs. 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. The way that racism operates aesthetically is to neglect or, in extreme cases, erase whoever is not white. And for the first hundred or so years of filmmaking, camera technology chose to ignore people of color entirely, leaving photographers' tools with built-in biases. Choices are made in the development and production of photographic materials.' In other words, what you see in a photo is never pure reality-it's the world as someone has chosen to depict it. In Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television, British academic Brian Winston writes, 'Colour photography is not bound to be ‘faithful' to the natural world. People often think of technology as inherently unbiased, but photography has a history of racism.

In the name of enhancing or beautifying our photos, filters inevitably alter our appearances beyond recognition.

Dark filters for photos