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That was really, really well done. Thank you so much for sharing.



One insight that just now occurred to me is that there's some serious political posturing at work in this video.

Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin tones. It used to be incredibly difficult to take good colour photos of black people.

It's clear that Land wanted to demonstrate that the insanely great dynamic range of Polaroid film was perfectly capable of bringing photography to the black demographic.


>Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin tones

I find it odd to call this "biased". It's about physics: due to light intensity, it will be generally easier to photograph (capture on film or digital sensors) objects that reflect moderate amounts of light with some contrast, than objects that reflect very little light with little contrast.



Yes, film wasn't sensitive enough for black skin.

Personally, I'm inconvenienced by discrimination against tall people (for instance, in airplane passenger seats).


> Yes, film wasn't sensitive enough for black skin

This was not a constraint of physics or chemistry: Kodak knew it, and they didn't care much for black skin. This was bias because they could fix it, but didn't. Fortunately, Kodak did ended up caring for other brown things: Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the company didn’t develop a better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”




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