Kodak was the primary company for color film (npr.com). What would happen is a customer would bring in their film to a shop or lab and they would then print the pictures for them In order to maintain clean and precise photos, a Shirley Card would be used to eliminate anything out of the ordinary. So where did the name come from “Shirley” come from? It came from the original model used by Kodak (npr.com). The model was used as a “guide” for what was needed for pictures. When Shirley Cards were first used, only Caucasian females were used (npr.com).
Shirley Cards have …show more content…
In the early 1970s, African Americans started to appear in the cards (npr.com). “I started incorporating black models pretty heavily in our testing, and it caught on very quickly,” said Jim
Lyon, a former tech researcher for Kodak. He adds that he they did this in order to create a better film and to incorporate everyone’s skin tone in an appropriate way (npr.com). Once this happened, Kodak began to add all sorts of ethnicities in their Shirley Cards. In 1995, Kodak invented a multiracial card that showed a Caucasian, Asian and African women (Wikipedia).
These are the types of cards that are used today, which are better because of the difference in skin tone and the use of bright clothing.
Shirley Cards have had a major significance is culture and in mass media. When it comes to culture, the cards opened up the color barrier for women and even for men. Once African
American women were portrayed in the cards, these women began to have opportunities just as equal as to Caucasian women (npr.com). The Shirley Cards opened up the cultural norm to