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The Importance of Pairing Black Imagery with Universal Stories
Changing the landscape of stock photography
I was looking for a photo to pair with a draft and was more quickly scrolling since my query seemed misconstrued by Unsplash. I noticed something curious: almost every photo was of a blonde white woman.
The history of photography is racially biased, originally using a white woman as a test image for color correction, called the Shirley Card. In the 1960s and 1970s, it took chocolatiers and furniture makers complaining to Kodak about bad brown tones and wood grain detail capture for standards to change. Even today, few filmmakers in television and movies are getting the richness of black skin right. They still have to innovate to shed the best light, even as international fashion magazine staples have continued to flail until only a few years ago.
Oppressive societies form systems that tend to build in the same barriers over and over. Social media silencing of black and ingenious people while coddling white bigotry mirrors real life. It should surprise no one. Add to that, with Unsplash’s recent purchase by Getty Images, one of the largest stock photo houses in the world, those monochromatic images will be amplified in the stratosphere.
