I never met him, but there was a color scientist at Kodak dedicated to studying the history of skin tone in print. Over the years in print magazines, skin tone has wandered into green, orange and blue. Color management is the term of art for reproducing the colors in nature in a naturally believable way. Color management was built into film; our eyes are very sensitive to the correctness of skin tone. Today the computer in your camera does the same, then you can remix it further in Photoshop.
Shirley Cards, named after Kodak model Shirley Page, were portrait standards including color patches used to calibrate photography from film to print. Similar systems are used in video. Their history is traced by Dr. Lorna Roth at Concordia University, Ontario, Canada, for instance: www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2196/3069.
The challenge is that if the final image we see, a photographic print, a magazine print, a web image, video, or projected film has a figure with a different skin tone to a Shirley card, and the Shirley card is used to correct the image, the skin tone will not be accurate. (We leave for a moment the abysmal lack of calibration in computer screens and home entertainment TV screens; Filmmaker Mode, welcome!)
In about the 1980's Kodak introduced Shirley cards with Caucasian, Asian, and African models on the same card. Meanwhile, Fujifilm introduced its own models to more accurately reproduce Japanese skin tone. Today, we have a variety of mass-produced color checker targets, and the implied class setting of Kodak's models have been updated as illustrated in Getty's surreal version at www.colourbalance.lornaroth.com/projects/shirley-card/.
Contemporary artists and social commentators worldwide have incorporated the male gaze and the Shirley Card into their creative analysis, though we don't see much critical thinking about beauty and the absence of male models, to say nothing of implied class and income/asset inequality. Maybe we need a Nomads or Residents of New York by Serrano, set in Portland? Nonetheless we are starting to get traction on simple things like first aid bandages.
The Presence of Color by painter Jeremy Okai Davis are portraits inspired by the Shirley Cards. He works in portraits from photographs with a great awareness of color, so the show is an ouroboros. Davis is the latest Stumptown Coffee Roasters Artist Fellow, which this opening celebrates. At Stumptown www.stumptowncoffee.com 128 SW 3rd 5PM-7 Free
