Collecting, salvaging, and—if I’m being honest—hoarding are essential activities in my art practice. I love the chance encounters that arise from gathering potential materials for my artwork. As such, my regular studio days include trips to flea markets and thrift stores, where one fortuitous discovery can lead me into deep and winding research rabbit holes.
It was during one of these routine visits last year that I came across a worn-out, dark green booklet titled Kodak Color Dataguide.
Printed in 1975, the Dataguide was a manual for printing film photographs. Tucked into the middle of this one was a small envelope containing a four-by-six-inch photo of a woman and the film negative to reproduce it. The subject, a white woman with brown hair, is centered between three bright pillows (red, yellow, and blue). A white fur cape hangs off her shoulders, and she holds her left hand—clad in pearls and a black evening glove—in front of her chest. I soon found out this photo was an example of what were known as “Shirley Cards.”
Beginning in the 1950s, due to the burgeoning demand for photo processing and printing services, one-hour photo labs opened all over the U.S. and Canada. Kodak supplied these labs with printers and a copy of the Kodak Color Dataguide for calibrating and standardizing colour. The Shirley Cards—named after Shirley Page, a Kodak employee at the time who served as the first model—were included in each copy as a reference for colour printing.
Lab technicians used Shirley Cards and the film negative in an effort to recreate the same image, using white skin tone as the norm. Built into the printing processes and film emulsion itself, photography’s bias has been an integral part of the medium’s problematic history with representation. Rather than a neutral technology for capturing light and its colour, photography has always been a reflection of subjective choices and aesthetic decisions: both in its images and in the very equipment that captures them.
For my project, Shirleys (2024), I collected the Shirley Cards from three different Guidebooks. At first glance, the photos appeared identical, but a closer look revealed subtle distinctions: a pillow in the same position but a different colour, or the slight movement of the thumb in the black-gloved hand. Together with other variations such as changes in skin tone due to the ageing of paper (the same Shirley appearing more yellow), I was drawn to how the materiality of technology revealed itself as media and mediator. Despite the efforts for sameness and consistency, the idea of whiteness and ultimately race is what Stuart Hall calls a “floating signifier,” a sliding and unfixed construct.
Placed atop the frame of one of my works from this series is one of the most uncanny objects in my collection, a 2024 Pantone Skin Color Guide. Purportedly created “by sampling actual skin tones across a full spectrum of human skin types,” the guide is intended as a tool for the creative and advertising industry. This measuring device strikes me as strange in its appeal to cool objectivity and scientific accuracy.
Growing up in Latin America, a region with a colonial past where most of the population is of mixed heritage to varying degrees, colourism and the spectrum of skin hue seemed deeply entwined in our social structures, norms, and values. Even as technology has improved in delivering accurate representations in images, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is not only the technologies themselves but the technicians, photographers, and designers, as well as the industries, brands, and institutions surrounding them, that frame what we see and how we see it.
Juan Ortiz-Apuy is a Canadian-Costa Rican artist who has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal since 2003. Ortiz-Apuy has a BFA from Concordia University (2008), a Post-Graduate Diploma from The Glasgow School of Art (2009), and an MFA from NSCAD University (2011).
His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in venues such as Les Abattoirs Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (France), IKEA Museum (Sweden), Pamflett (Norway), DHC/ART Fondation Phi pour l’art contemporain (Montreal), Owens Art Gallery (Sackville), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), MOMENTA Biennale de l’image (Montreal), Quebec City Biennial: Manif d’art 7 (Québec), Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary), Museum London (London), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto), VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine (Montreal), Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), and the Esker Foundation (Calgary).
Ortiz-Apuy has been awarded numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His work has been reviewed in various publications such as Canadian Art, MOMUS, esse arts + opinions, The Gazette (Montreal), Le Devoir (Montreal), and Public Parking. In 2024, he was awarded Best International Representation by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA, Costa Rican Chapter).
Ortiz-Apuy has completed several artist-in-residence programs, most notably at MASS MoCA (USA), The Vermont Studio Center (USA), The Frans Masereel Centre (Belgium), and the Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center (Denmark).
Ortiz-Apuy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University.
This article is published in issue 41.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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