How Unprotected Illuminates Black Actors Correctly
For decades, photography and video equipment has been designed and tested for white people only. Lighting darker skin tones requires a different approach than lighting pale skin tones. Ava Berkofsky, director of photography for HBO Insecure , explains to Mick how her team beautifully covers the black cast of the show , and Mic reporter Xavier Harding demonstrates some of the techniques below.
Good lighting benefits from the collaboration of multiple departments. The makeup department should use a reflective moisturizer on dark-skinned faces, Berkofsky said. The lighting crew should maximize the surface area of the light, and the film crew should shape that light with a polarizing lens.
Harding explains some of the racist history of photographic technology and the marginalizing effect of treating white models as the default. Cameras shouldn’t have been designed to capture white skin more easily than dark skin; these disadvantages were built into the system by carefully optimizing the technology for white skin only. According to BuzzFeed’s Syreeta McFadden, Kodak unveiled stocks of black-friendly film only after complaints from chocolate and furniture advertisers . In Priceonomics, Rosie Chima talks about how the television industry has embraced and perpetuated this bias, and how filmmakers have tried to overcome it.
At Jezebel, Dodai Stewart explored some of the contemporary implications of the story , such as poor coverage of minorities in high-budget shows and films, and overtly whitewashed magazine photos. Because of the industry’s deliberate choice of the film industry, photographers still have to learn “special” techniques to properly capture a huge portion of the population. Berkowski tells Mika that even in film school she was not taught to photograph people of non-white people.
Digital photography has provided many solutions, but as McFaddno explains to Buzzfeed (and MIT Media Lab’s Joy Buolamwini further investigates ), he inherited many of the prejudices of white skin. So Berkowski’s unsafe has a suggestion for people with dark skin gripping seli: Prepare some kind of soft light and turn three-quarters towards it. Because not only TV stars and white people look great on camera.