Reflective Encounters

“In recent years, as visual media has continued to proliferate in everyday life, conversations around the camera’s seeming inability to capture darker skin tones have achieved greater awareness. This “mechanical racism”, as termed by Chihying Musquiqui’s short doc The Lighting, highlights tensions between technology, business, and art.

The camera as a technology emerged out of industrialised capitalism in the West, which itself was structured by a racist hierarchy. As camera technology moves from film to digital, these ingrained biases have only become further entrenched, posing difficulties in an era of globalisation where everyone is a potential customer to be courted.

The film sees a software engineer at a Taiwanese tech company discuss facial recognition algorithms when confronted with examples of such technology failing to recognise Black subjects in low lighting, or misreading Asian subjects as having their eyes closed. This conversation is broken up by conversations with photographers from Togo who discuss how they work around the mechanical racism of cameras when lighting Black skin. What arises from these disparate discourses is a recognition of the camera’s innately expressive capabilities, coupled with a recognition that its development comes from a racist history.”

— Cathy Brennan