Colorism, Past and Present

The many faces of Lena Horne

There is a trend, particularly widespread among the amateur genealogical community, to share historical photos which have been colorized.

There are a myriad reasons why this practice is at best misguided, and at worst, a vector for ethnic whitewashing.

Most non-professionals probably assume that cameras and video recording devices are inherently “neutral” instruments for collecting visual data.

From the advent of photography during the mid-1800s up to the present day, this has never been the case.

The very chemicals used to produce and develop early color film were optimised to capture the shades and skin tones of “white” European faces.

The Kodak film company was well aware of this technical bias, yet steadfastedly refused to reconfigure or reoptimise its film manufacturing process (to enable it to capture dark skin tones properly) right up until the 1970s.

Even then, Kodak only relented under commercial pressure from furniture and chocolate manufacturers unable to create appealing advertisements for their products using standard film.  The complaints of Latino and Black Americans throughout the 1950s and 1960s had gone unheeded.

In the days before color film, photographers and camera operators had quickly learned that judicious use of makeup, set lighting, and other factors could be employed to radically alter the ethnic appearance of actors.

This technical application of “colorism” during the earliest days of black and white Hollywood films had allowed many people of color or mixed ethnicity to “pass as white” in order to win more of the parts available in movies.

But do not think that this is all ancient history.

Facial recognition software, the cameras on our smartphones, the very algorithmic systems which surround us in this Brave New World of AI, are constantly encoding the multitude of social biases and inequalities present everywhere in the real world and on the internet, and baking them into the new digital reality.

Many law enforcement bodies and jurisdictions are already employing facial recognition software which has been regularly demonstrated to have profound data set problems when attempting to identify “non-white” faces.

Which brings us back to our initial point about colorizing old photos.

Most colorization is now being done with the help of AI systems, and as such, these systems are currently utterly incapable of the nuance required to assign a “color” to people of complex ethnicity.

My own mixed-ethnic ancestors (the Melungeons of Appalachia), do not typically show strong sub-Saharan African facial features, even though many are of very dark complexion, and count African-Americans among their forebears.

A deep historical understanding of the origins of these people is required to even begin to hazard a guess as to how they might have looked “in living color”.

AI colorization systems, however, regularly portray these people as being of a broadly “white European” appearance in terms of skin tone.

With the plethora of colorized photos now being shared online, I am beginning to wonder if this ahistorical “whitening” suits a certain section of Americans…

I’ve shared five images of the celebrated Black American actress Lena Horne.

One is a Hollywood publicity still, which through lighting and makeup manages to intentionally downplay Ms. Horne’s non-European features.

Three other images show her being represented somewhat more accurately.

The last image is the black and white publicity photo put through a standard AI colorizing system.

While it is tempting (and exciting) to believe we are getting a more accurate glimpse of the “living past” through the process of colorizing, what we are actually getting is Eurocentric “colorism”.