Pages: 1 [2] 3   Go Down

Author Topic: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)  (Read 3819 times)

rabanito

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1577
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #20 on: April 29, 2019, 04:54:34 pm »


You're getting off on the wrong foot. It's not about metering, but about dynamic range.

Hear! Hear!
That's what I meant too
Logged

Slobodan Blagojevic

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Online Online
  • Posts: 18090
  • When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks
    • My website
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #21 on: April 29, 2019, 05:13:48 pm »

I love it when a guy who has no clue about photography, and in particular the technical side of it, pontificates about the technical side of photography and claims that the science of photography is inherently racist. Where is the proof that modern cameras do not do well with dark skins? That is, anymore than black tux/white wedding dress, for instance.

kers

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4388
    • Pieter Kers
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #22 on: April 29, 2019, 05:14:23 pm »

This is a discussion that is indeed history, and not relevant anymore.
If you look at the images put out at the moment, every type of skin and race is pictured, and well exposed.
- skins getting too red is still a problem- a technical problem ...
If you see the old target in the article - it looks awful... but that might be an analogue to digital technical problem.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2019, 05:18:22 pm by kers »
Logged
Pieter Kers
www.beeld.nu/la

amolitor

  • Contributor
  • Sr. Member
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 607
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #23 on: April 29, 2019, 05:24:45 pm »

This is a discussion that is indeed history, and not relevant anymore.
If you look at the images put out at the moment, every type of skin and race is pictured, and well exposed.
- skins getting too red is still a problem- a technical problem ...
If you see the old target in the article - it looks awful... but that might be a analogue to digital technical problem.

This is a fair point. Things have obviously comes a long ways since Shirley. Cameras, for all I know, work equally well or poorly across all skin colors for the most part. Up and coming technologies, however, don't. Google's facial recognition system famously tagged africans as gorillas not too long ago, and, frankly, it takes only a few seconds on google to come up with a bunch of software that was discovered to fail miserably on this racial group or that.

Now, I don't expect that to roll in to Canon's next generation facial-recognition focus/metering algorithms, and therefore collapse when confronted with African people. Why do I expect the best from Canon, rather than the worst? Because the media continues to cover these issues, continues to make sure that the not-African people working on the code continue to have somewhat forward in their minds "right, right, test on black people, don't forget" rather than gradually forgetting about that continent in the rush to deliver features.

Canon knows that there's likely to be a ****storm if their next generation cameras can't successfully eye-focus, or meter, when confronted with dark-skinned people. If they didn't know this, they might very well drop the ball.
Logged

rabanito

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1577
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #24 on: April 29, 2019, 05:29:17 pm »

As a humble newbie I must concede that I don't understand the issue.
Dark skin falls on zone IV, white skin on zone VI. The gray card on zone V.
Has anything changed? Is there a real problem?

And yes, of course I had to google to know who this Ms.Lewis is.
Logged

Robert Roaldi

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4763
    • Robert's Photos
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #25 on: April 29, 2019, 05:35:38 pm »

Yes, this specific issue is history.

But similar issues arise in other ways in tech. Facial recognition softwares have been found to not handle non-white faces very well. I listened to a podcast recently (sorry, forgotten which one) about this very problem and in at least one case was traced to the fact that the AI was "taught" faces from a skewed data base of primarily white faces. Easy enough to fix, perhaps or perhaps not, depending on how well the program was written. This points to inadequate testing but as an ex-IT guy, I can tell you that very little software gets properly tested these days, especially if it delays delivery (and payment). It's easy to write this off as an outlier problem until the wrong person is stopped at a border with modern-day reduced due process. Aside from the obvious problem of an innocent person being victimized by bad AI design, it also means the AI may be missing the real bad guys. As we rely more and more on this stuff, these issues will become more and more important.

The point I am trying to make is that it's better not to dismiss a topic too quickly until you know all the ramifications. The specific problem of photo exposure can and has been dealt with, but the larger problem will turn up in other areas. The article that was originally referred to may have done a bad job of describing this, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.
Logged
--
Robert

faberryman

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4851
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #26 on: April 29, 2019, 05:36:59 pm »

As a humble newbie I must concede that I don't understand the issue.
Dark skin falls on zone IV, white skin on zone VI. The gray card on zone V.
Has anything changed? Is there a real problem?
Color rendition has been a problem in the past with film. I don''t know if it is now a problem with digital sensors.
Logged

amolitor

  • Contributor
  • Sr. Member
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 607
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #27 on: April 29, 2019, 05:40:40 pm »

As a humble newbie I must concede that I don't understand the issue.
Dark skin falls on zone IV, white skin on zone VI. The gray card on zone V.
Has anything changed? Is there a real problem?

And yes, of course I had to google to know who this Ms.Lewis is.

Skin falls where you want it to fall, eh? Just for fun I pulled out my copy of Ansel Adams "The Negative" and my copy of Walker Evans "American Photographs" and started comparing the little zone system chart in the former with skin tones in the latter, and, well, the answers were all over the place. Globally, skin tones had by various people probably cover 4-5 zones all by themselves, and when you chuck in lighting you pretty much run a gamut from Zones III through IX without looking unnatural or "improperly exposed."

But, Lewis's issue isn't really with this or that technicality.
Logged

David Sutton

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1345
    • David Sutton Photography
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #28 on: April 29, 2019, 05:51:44 pm »

My feeling is that the issue is mostly being confused. You all know how to meter. How skin tones look becomes an aesthetic decision. I don't see any issue there.
I had in mind as an example Zanele Muholi (https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/04/monograph-zanele-muholi/)
On the other hand, out in the real world, most technology (cameras, face recognition etc) is used on automatic. People press a button. That's it.
That's where some questions need to be raised about how well the tech is working.
Logged

rabanito

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1577
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #29 on: April 29, 2019, 06:02:32 pm »

Skin falls where you want it to fall, eh? Just for fun I pulled out my copy of Ansel Adams "The Negative" and my copy of Walker Evans "American Photographs" and started comparing the little zone system chart in the former with skin tones in the latter, and, well, the answers were all over the place. Globally, skin tones had by various people probably cover 4-5 zones all by themselves, and when you chuck in lighting you pretty much run a gamut from Zones III through IX without looking unnatural or "improperly exposed."

But, Lewis's issue isn't really with this or that technicality.

You compared tones from books? And on top of that from two different books?
Well, I wouldn't do that. Just MHO
Logged

amolitor

  • Contributor
  • Sr. Member
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 607
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #30 on: April 29, 2019, 06:15:53 pm »

I could probably expand on this in endless boring detail, but perhaps it will suffice to say I did not select the books at random, and I that have reason to believe that the brief investigation I conducted provides useful information.
Logged

Slobodan Blagojevic

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Online Online
  • Posts: 18090
  • When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks
    • My website
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #31 on: April 29, 2019, 06:27:12 pm »

... Google's facial recognition system famously tagged africans as gorillas not too long ago...

Don't blame the technology, geeks, or AI, but mother nature.

rabanito

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1577
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #32 on: April 29, 2019, 06:46:34 pm »

I could probably expand on this in endless boring detail, but perhaps it will suffice to say I did not select the books at random, and I that have reason to believe that the brief investigation I conducted provides useful information.

Whatever.
You selected Walker Evans' book and one of the editions of The Negative (both editions I have, 1948 and 1981, are more or less poorly printed - but do their job of explaining the ZS if you WORK with it) and I can assure you from my humble seat that comparing the tones of the printed images with Walker Evans' whatever edition it is you have, is not the right thing to do.

That said, I propose to leave it at that.  ;)




 
Logged

amolitor

  • Contributor
  • Sr. Member
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 607
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #33 on: April 29, 2019, 07:00:37 pm »

Relevant technical details for my comparison: roughly similar print capability and rendering intent.

Check.
Check.
Logged

faberryman

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4851
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #34 on: April 29, 2019, 07:15:15 pm »

I think I have seen skin tones in Zone IX. Avedon and Gibson come to mind. It is a particular aesthetic decision. What that has to do with photography being racist is anyone's guess.
Logged

kers

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4388
    • Pieter Kers
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #35 on: April 29, 2019, 07:18:59 pm »

Yes, this specific issue is history.

But similar issues arise in other ways in tech. Facial recognition softwares have been found to not handle non-white faces very well. I listened to a podcast recently (sorry, forgotten which one) about this very problem and in at least one case was traced to the fact that the AI was "taught" faces from a skewed data base of primarily white faces. Easy enough to fix, perhaps or perhaps not, depending on how well the program was written. This points to inadequate testing but as an ex-IT guy, I can tell you that very little software gets properly tested these days, especially if it delays delivery (and payment). It's easy to write this off as an outlier problem until the wrong person is stopped at a border with modern-day reduced due process. Aside from the obvious problem of an innocent person being victimized by bad AI design, it also means the AI may be missing the real bad guys. As we rely more and more on this stuff, these issues will become more and more important.

The point I am trying to make is that it's better not to dismiss a topic too quickly until you know all the ramifications. The specific problem of photo exposure can and has been dealt with, but the larger problem will turn up in other areas. The article that was originally referred to may have done a bad job of describing this, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.
I understand what you say, the original problem was when there were no coloured models; Since then things have changed in a multi-cultural way in that field but not (yet) in others...
There are enough battles for equal rights to be fought. Men are still paid more than women etc etc..
Logged
Pieter Kers
www.beeld.nu/la

Two23

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 827
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #36 on: April 29, 2019, 07:22:28 pm »

NYT has zero credibility with me.  I won't waste my time.


Kent in SD
Logged
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,
miserere nobis.

kers

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4388
    • Pieter Kers
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #37 on: April 29, 2019, 07:28:08 pm »

NYT has zero credibility with me.  I won't waste my time.


Kent in SD

So what news paper do you 'trust' / find credible
Logged
Pieter Kers
www.beeld.nu/la

Bart_van_der_Wolf

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 8913
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #38 on: April 29, 2019, 08:10:57 pm »

Don't blame the technology, geeks, or AI, but mother nature.

Since you've not added an emoticon, I have to assume you are being serious. Are you?

Cheers,
Bart
Logged
== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

Slobodan Blagojevic

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Online Online
  • Posts: 18090
  • When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks
    • My website
Re: Sarah Lewis thinks photography's history is racist (NYT)
« Reply #39 on: April 29, 2019, 08:14:27 pm »

Since you've not added an emoticon, I have to assume you are being serious. Are you?

Yes.
Pages: 1 [2] 3   Go Up