Jet Cover Girls

Although Davis identifies primarily as a portrait painter, this work comes from a series in which he investigates race and racism within the history of photography. Working with archives of Black American magazines from the 1950s through the 1970s, such as Jet and Sepia, Davis came to see the damaging effects of historically specific color correction techniques for the representation of darker skin tones. This print references the history of “Shirley cards,” a system developed by Kodak to color correct skin tones during film processing. Through this history, the industry standard for color correcting became biased toward light skin, disregarding darker complexions, which were often under or over-exposed as a result.