The Message in the Machine: How to Read a Technical Mistake

Terence C. Price II | A Message From Home | Crisis | 2021 | 135 Pages

Image by Angelo Maneage

The history of race in America has been written as if technologies scarcely existed, and the history of technology as if it were utterly innocent of racial significance. –Jessie Daniels, “Race and Racism in Internet Studies” (2012)

It is a Black gaze that shifts the optics of “looking at” to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another. –Tina M. Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021)

Maybe you’ve heard about the algorithmic racial bias in digital imaging technology. You see it whenever dark skin is invisible to facial recognition software, widely used in consequential processes like job interview searches, law enforcement, and bank loan decisions. Over the past decade, Facebook, Amazon, and Google have issued many apologies for misidentifying the global majority. This comes to mind when I first open a book of black and white photography and see an image of a Black woman that is nearly unreadable. What I see when I look at the photograph—Tammy—is not her face centered in the foreground, but rather the light behind her. Why do my eyes slip right past the apparent subject? If racial bias can change what and how humans see, can’t it also be built into photographic technology? My experience of looking at Tammy—which is to say looking past Tammy—is not unusual because misrecognition of people with dark skin is one late-stage manifestation of a longstanding bias toward centering white people. The photographic apparatus itself has enabled and legitimized anti-blackness, and its habitual use has naturalized a cultural compulsion to render white people white, to distinguish and clarify whiteness. We see everyone else flattened, distorted, blurred, murky unregistered—made into a (technical) problem.

For instance, Polaroid’s ID2 camera, created in 1966, has a flash boost button engineered to add 42% more light on its subjects, the exact amount needed to deliberately darken Black subjects. No accident that this camera was the official instrument used to create passbooks, a tool of racial segregation and enforcement during apartheid in South Africa. White fear and disdain, the form of a 42% flash boost, warped and obscured Black faces. Even the surface of objectivity of an id photo reveals a legacy of misrepresentation. The Polaroid was considered a revelation at the time, but technical innovation is not a straightforward social good and it tends to build on its native frameworks. The science of current digital photography is very much based on the same principles that shaped film photography. Focus the camera on something dark, and the mechanism goes to sleep. 

In the early 1950s, Kodak explicitly pioneered color film explicitly for white faces. Both the film itself and the way it was processed used a white body as a light meter, rendering other skin tones as deviations from the norm.When you sent off film to be developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman—the original model was a Kodak employee named Shirley—as the standard against which they calibrated all color, shadows, and light during the printing process. Quality control ensured that Shirley’s white face looked good. All Shirley cards, as they came to be called, were white women, often tagged with the word “normal,” as if the point needed to be driven home.

In 1978, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film—calling it racist—to shoot in Mozambique. Contemporary cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma) advocates underexposing dark skin tones in the service of more resonance and less racism. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three then four women (white, Black, Asian, Latina) to acknowledge the range of human skin tones. You’d want to believe racial progress forced this change, but it was actually pressure from chocolate and furniture industries, who complained that photography muddied the subtle varieties of wood and chocolate tones in their products’ ads. Kodak responded to these capitalist demands. Because the tetrachromatic Shirley card coincided with the rise of digital photography, many companies, in their rush to embrace the new market, failed to adopt the new multiracial Shirley cards. The result was that much of film emulsion technology continued to carry the racial bias of earlier photographic conventions and so did the new color-balancing of digital technology. Our blind investment in technical innovation has helped to displace a broader and more significant set of social values. Only this summer, did Abode’s Lightroom roll out portrait presets for melanated skin. It took unbearable pressure from photographers and artists to make this happen in the year 2021. The bottom line is that all technology is designed and that design, unless consciously corrected, carries ideology in the form of fixed assumptions. Laboratories that develop film, like the tech companies that calibrate our screens, have used this fixed point to establish “true colors” and illuminate white faces, as if white people themselves have a privileged relationship with light.

I don’t need to tell you that, in our culture, light is synonymous with knowledge and understanding, god and goodness. If seeing is believing, seeing also is surveillance and power. We like to think photography allows us to see further and with more sensitivity and expansive attention than with our eyes alone. Yet the white gaze tends, at best, toward erasing or stereotyping Blackness. If you are Black, you’ve probably had the experience of a white person mistaking you for another Black person. Misrecognition is built into white ways of seeing. White people react strongly to the subtlest differences in white faces, but don’t register difference in even dramatically unlike Black faces. Maybe this is what white people mean when they say they “don’t see color”? The inability to individuate nonwhite people mirrors photography’s habitual violence to Black images. Pace a history of using photography to dehumanize and manage Black people via methods of classification, criminalization, and medicalization. Our saturation in images of brutalization and unrelenting surveillance of nonwhite people is where we find ourselves, still, and where correction is most potentially transformative. 

Terence C. Price II’s A Message from Home (Crisis, 2021), a book of black and white street photography, is part of the ongoing public claiming and recasting of images of Black people that resist fixed narratives. Instead of recycling generalized ideas about Black life, Price challenges overdetermined and preset frames for viewing Blackness. His subjects project intricate interiorities and subjectivities largely denied in American history. Price’s gift for visualizing the gorgeousness, grit, and glory of Black Miamians in their own milieu, which is also his own, rides in part on his capacity to love his subject while simultaneously talking back to (and around and into) power with his camera. 

What you can’t see when you get this gorgeous book in your hands is the initial mishandling of his work. The first printing of the book denied his subjects their mattering. It rendered many of the Black faces into black holes, featureless blots on the page, humans pressed into shadows and silhouettes. The subjects had been wrenched back into the white gaze: simplified and illegible. The photographs were not overexposed; the press-ready files were calibrated for full tonal range; the proofs looked correct, but the printed book was too heavily inked. The book also suffered offsetting—the ink was so dark and wet that it hadn’t dried before the pages were folded, which transferred ink onto the white of facing pages. Using too much ink and/or rushing the process are problems that have plagued printing companies since the advent of the offset press, yet standards only fail in their ability to address the visual significance of print defects. In other words, what problem?

Without context, you may have skeptically wondered just how racist technology can be. Yet when I tell you that a majority-white printer in a white town (96%) in Canada nearly ruined the book, I hope you will understand what’s at stake. This book is free*; it is not commerce that’s at stake. Terence C. Price II shows us the many ways a body can hold both history and home; he shows us a vivid vernacular of relationality. Scenes from a life, from a neighborhood, from a carefully observant, quietly revolutionary eye: signs, cars, bikes, buses, high rises, fences, palm trees, backyards, protests, reunions proliferate. The most common image, however, is the portrait. Price offers a kinetic range of self-possession and intimacy in his subjects’ gestures, postures and facial expressions riveted to fully nuanced situations. Yet when Price’s photographs traveled from Miami, where they were made, to Manitoba, where they were made into a physical book, they fell into the trap of white supremacy, a machine made for violence. 

What is the significance of printing Black faces too darkly? Take Tammy for instance—what is suppressed in the first printing (left) is the complexity of her expression, which balances disclosure and mystery, direction and indirection. In fact, Tammy herself, front and center in the photograph, is neutralized by lack of detail; she becomes an impediment to our vision, an object to look beyond.

On the right, in the second printing, we recognize something held open, a feeling flickering on the verge of an idea. Her sideways glance sees us even before she registers what she sees. The slant of her shoulders sits in the crux, between the back end of a car and the front end of slide. She is going somewhere. Her hair, necklace, and blouse are all muted on the left.  In the first printing, if we don’t look past the human subject entirely, we face only what we think we already know. In the second, we become curious about Tammy; we become enthralled in the marvelous mundane. 

An offset press operator who has tested the inks and substrates can make modifications (e.g. by adding surfactants, defoamers, or primers, and adjusting plate pressure, press speed, ink coverage, etc.), either prior to a pressrun or on the fly, as needed. Standard practices give the printer great control over the measures used to prevent defects. Yet what constitutes a problem? What givens, priorities, and values enable a press operator to recognize a glitch?  Because cultural norms are coded into technical systems, seemingly innocent processes reflect and reproduce racialized ideologies. Even glitches signal something about their context and come situated within larger complex of social meanings and structures. Technical mistakes happen at all levels of production, but in this case, the printer refused to take responsibility. Did they see their mistake? Yes, sort of, maybe. Did they absolve themselves of culpability? Absolutely. By doing so, their complicity in the legacy of institutional racism is also absolute. The book was set to become a case study in the racial imaginary. After weeks of discussion and negotiation, the publisher, Crisis Studio, landed on a way, at their own expense, to faithfully render Price’s vision. The printer reprinted the book without ever implicating themselves in the long tradition of white myopia. Though the book was initially intended to come out on May Day, it finally made its way to us at the same time our country made Juneteenth a holiday, and in the same breath our lawmakers made talking about the legacy of racism in schools a crime.

NOTES

Thanks to the essential work of Lorna Roth, Richard Dyer, Brent Hughes, Zoe Samundzi, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarinhere. I rely on their research and ideas here, in condensed form. 

*Terence C. Price II’s A Message from Home is the tenth book in a series of free “May Day Books” edited, designed, and published by Crisis Studio. May 1st is International Workers Day (May Day), honoring laborers, labor movements, and the fight for worker’s rights. Some recent examples from the May Day book archive, a utopian project, include The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner, Cherish X Abolish, Boredom Weeps, The Prison Dictionary, and a tête-bêche featuring Assata Shakur’s “Women in Prison: How It Is with Us” and Emma Goldman’s “The Assassination of McKinley.”