I worked as a colour printer in the 1970s, doing most of my work for wedding and portrait photographers.
There was all sorts of cultural influence on how my customers - the photographers - preferred to have prints of their customers - the end clients - appear.
It was not unusual to have customers of Chinese heritage prefer a print that made them appear more as a rosy cheeked Caucasian from northern European stock. That didn't happen because those customers couldn't see the differences, but rather because of expectations that may have been out of date and, frankly, unfortunate.
In those cases, I would have preferred to make what I would have considered to be more accurate prints.
At the time, there were very few black people in our community, but there was a strong contingent of people of Chinese heritage, and some of them were descendants of people who had come to the Pacific Northwest several generations previously.
Many of those early arrivals had endured tremendous racial discrimination. In the 1970s there was a strange mix of residual discrimination and burgeoning multi-ethnic acceptance.
I say all this, because many of the articles that I have seen on this subject seem to me to get it backwards. The standards - like the "Shirley" standards - were reactive in nature. People developed those standards to reflect the work that was before them. When photofinishing was the purview of the big, centralized labs, many of the people in those labs or involved in designing things for those labs didn't have many people of colour in their lives.
In some cases, those standards may have served to perpetuate some problems, but generally (and sometimes slowly) they evolved as the market evolved.
People often decry the effect that the "one hour photo" lab had on quality. In one really important way, it caused a great improvement of quality.
In one hour photo labs, the people doing the printing were members of the community that there customers shared with them. And multi-ethnic communities quickly developed colour printing people who had a good eye for multi-ethnic skin tones.
I've known people in the photographic industry - including the photo-finishing industry - for around 5 decades.
In all that time, I can't think of a single person who didn't want to serve and sell to people of all ethnic heritage. I've known a few people who would make bright green prints of you, if they could sell them.
