Episode 36 – Shirley, You Can’t Be Serious

On episode 36, we talk to Liz Potter (@lizpotterphotography on IG), whose zines basically put the rest of ours to sad, sad shame. We talk a bit about the Shirley Card and what it meant to not just color film, but to people of color. There’s also a zine review and the answering machine. Plus a new segment with a new host – Tiffen Sinclair (@tiffen.sinclair on IG)!

Liz Potter

This past week, we both received two breath-taking zines in the mail, and both from Liz Potter. We had Liz on in September, but since that time, she’s been way busier than all of us put together.

Here are her two new zines:

These are available on her Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/LizPotterPhotography

During the interview, we talked about shooting square vs. shooting panoramas. Here are some comparisons:

We discussed two panoramic photos in particular:

And here are a few of her other photos:

Shirley Cards and Kodak’s Racial Missteps

Kodak noticed early on that the skin tones of the models they were using were sometimes too blush or sometimes too pale, depending upon the lighting, the emulsion and the printing. Realizing that a standard was needed, they grabbed their favorite model, a woman by the name of Shirley Long, took a few photos of her and color matched the prints in the lab.

What they produced was soon known as “The Shirley Card” – a rudimentary color print showing the brunette Shirley in a red cloak holding a blue folder. It was from this card that lab techs would calibrate their prints.

Here are a few examples of Kodak’s Shirley Cards:

And this is Kodak’s first multi-racial Shirley Card, used in 1995:

Much of our information on this has come from the paper “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm” by Lorna Roth. We’ll have a link to the original in our shownotes.

https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2196