> Part of the reason is likely that black people, particularly dark skinned black people, are just harder to photograph than people of other ethnicities

If that were true, that would just mean photography-based systems are currently not good enough to work across any population that includes dark skinned people. Society should not, and cannot collectively wrings hands and say "Oh, well, it's really because of the photons" and go ahead make use of a provably unjust technology.

Thankfully, modern phone cameras can take great high dynamic range photos as well as low-light/night pictures - I'm confident to say capturing dark-skin is a much easier bar to clear (dynamic range can be much smaller if you only care for a person's face). The fact that good-enough technology is not used (or mandated), and the solutions providers & their clients decide on cheap(er) sensors with exposures that only work well with light skin tones... well, that tells a story by itself, doesn't it?

Oh come on! “They” are harder to photograph? This is exactly the same like saying black people are less intelligent because they don’t hold the higher paid jobs. It’s not by choice. Nor is there any physical reason why that should be.

The technology to photograph is biased to better capture white skinned people.

It even says so in the very article you link to:

“A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.”

Improve the technology!

Given that the available equipment is what's available, saying that the equipment is biased versus that black people are harder to photograph is a distinction without a difference. I've literally experienced this when I saw how a film photo of one of my friends come out. He isn't super dark skinned, but he is dark enough that this particular film tinted him green! You can't tell me that was the photographer's fault, can you? Was it my friend's fault? No, of course not, and I never said anything to the contrary.

I also resent your implication that I meant anything other than that. I never claimed it was the fault of black people, or that there was anything any individual black person could do about it. I think you should check your bias here.

You have to frame your statements correctly. It's not they who are hard to photograph. It's the hardware which has a hard time photographing them.

There is a deeply prevailing western misconception that systems that work for white people should also work for everyone else. When it invariably doesn't, it's always the fault of the minority. Funny how that is.

Again, that is a distinction without a difference. A photographer certainly can compensate for skin tone versus how the final result will be rendering, for instance, by using lighting, provided the scene is under the photographer's control. (Edit: see my comment further upthread where I pasted in a link about this very thing.) But, some of those methods have the disadvantage that by color correcting for skin tone, one automatically distorts the color in other parts of the image.

This is less true in digital photography, given the level of control over post processing one has. However, the end result is the same: it take more effort to produce a faithful photo of a black person than a white person, for reasons completely out of the control of either the photographer or the subject.

That is all that is meant by the statement I made. Indeed, it is literally the entire content of the statement I made. I would defy you to quote where I blamed black people, or even implied there was even anything any black person could do about this unfortunate reality.

Edit: Incidentally, literally everything I've said here about the difficulties of faithfully photographing people applies to darker skinned people of any ethnicity, such as Indians or Afro-Arab people. None of this is racist in the sense that it implies anyone is lesser than anyone else, just that that's the way current technology works.

pmiller2's intent was clear, he was obviously commenting on limitations of camera technology, not suggesting that black people intent nor choose(?!?) to be hard to photograph. dstick's response is maliciously uncharitable at best.

Thank you, as well, for recognizing what I was saying, and that, while I made statements involving race, there was no malicious racism behind any of it.

> This is exactly the same like saying ..

No it's not.

Shadows are harder to notice on black skin for example.

And it's important to improve the tech and try to make it work fine for everyone

But then you'll need to first realize that by default the tech is sometimes going to be broken for a group of people.

Otherwise how can you be aware about that there's a problem to solve.

Thank you. I appreciate that you recognize what I wrote here versus what some people apparently want to read into it.

And, just to continue the anecdote where the camera turned my friend green, y'all know it's not like anybody said "Hey, $FRINEDS_NAME, can you just be less black, or something?" In fact, what we did was all laugh together (including our friend, the subject of the photo), joke a little, and, IIRC, take a digital portrait.

That's fine, but the system shouldn't be dialed up to accept more false positive matches, but it sounds like it is being so.

Oh, I agree 100%. I'm just saying that maybe the quality of input to the algorithms leaves something to be desired.

Or, maybe the fact that there are relatively few black people in tech means that the developers of these algorithms don't even notice that there's a bias to correct for, whether it's in the input or not.