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I guess I assumed she had died decades earlier. (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/funny@sh.itjust.works

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[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You're reading too much into it. Colour ink was still expensive back then up until the late '80s to '00s. Which is why coloured photos were uncommon before, especially in the 1960s.

And before anyone suggests it, professional historians strongly discourage colouring black and white photos. This could give false impression of what the actual colour of some objects, or the subject itself in the photo.

I just Googled by the way of your claim, it turns out that the narrative is indeed hamfisted: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/20/fact-check-most-civil-rights-era-images-werent-made-color/3210472001/

Our ruling: Partly false

We rate this claim as partly false because it excludes context essential to understanding the difference in use between black-and-white and color photographs taken during that time period.

Although there is documented evidence of photo suppression during the civil rights movement, experts said the use of black-and-white over color photography was not part of it.

The post is misinformed and overlooks the fact that color photography was rare in the 1960’s due to its higher price, photojournalists’ need for quick turn-around, the sentiment of black-and-white photography being the “true” way of documentation and the challenges surrounding accurately depicting people of color with color film.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 months ago

In addition to color being too expensive for textbooks, it was also too expensive for newspapers. And colour film was more expensive than black and white film. Since photos taken by photo journalists at the time were meant to be printed in newspapers in B&W, most photographers shot with B&W film even while the technology for colour photography existed.

the sentiment of black-and-white photography being the “true” way of documentation

Well... B&W does have better resolution, both back then and now. Notice how many photos from NASA probes are in B&W? It's because to get color you either have to take three photos with filters on them and combine them together, which is what NASA does. Or have clusters of three different sensors in an array to pick up the different wavelengths, which is what most consumer cameras do. But that effectively cuts the resolution into a third of what it could be if you had sensors that simply detected light without caring about the wavelength.

Of course the way most cameras are constructed you don't get any benefit from B&W in terms of resolution since the way the sensors are arrayed is optimized for colour. But NASA's cameras allow for higher resolution B&W images (when they already know the colour of the thing they're looking at and they want to see detail) and the filters are there when they need to figure out what colour something is.