To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light,

I wrote about film's built-in-bias a few years ago. I remember an Ilford ad which featured  a white  and a black face - both perfectly exposed and with a full range of tones.  The ad was for  black and white paper though. Kodak films were something I boycotted  -for different reasons. The yellow boxes and the  red and white of Coke were  on my boycott  list  for as long as I can remember.  Probably as long as it took for Kodak to think about the need  " to Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light" and address it's film stock's inherent racist bias.

'Kodak Shirley' cards used for calibrating skin tones in photographs were named after the first model featured. Photograph: Adam Broomberg And Oliver Chanarin/Goodman Gallery

Can the camera be racist? The question is explored in an exhibition that reflects on how Polaroid built an efficient tool for South Africa's apartheid regime to photograph and police black people.

Broomberg and Chanarin say their work, on show at Johannesburg'sGoodman Gallery, examines "the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself". They argue that early colour film was predicated on white skin: in 1977, when Jean-Luc Godard was invited on an assignment to Mozambique, he refused to use Kodak film on the grounds that the stock was inherently "racist".

In 1970 Caroline Hunter, a young chemist working for Polaroid in America, stumbled upon evidence that the company was effectively supporting apartheid. She and her partner Ken Williams formed the Polaroid Workers Revolutionary Movement and campaigned for a boycott. By 1977 Polaroid had withdrawn from South Africa, spurring an international divestment movement that was crucial to bringing down apartheid.

The title of the exhibition, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, refers to the coded phrase used by Kodak to describe a new film stock created in the early 1980s to address the inability of earlier films to accurately render dark skin.

The show also features norm reference cards that always used white women as a standard for measuring and calibrating skin tones when printing photographs. The series of "Kodak Shirleys" were named after the first model featured. Today such cards show multiple races.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition