The politics of lighting dark skin – from Shirley cards to ‘Sinners’ the movie

By Rugmini Kalithodi

The first time I watched the Hollywood film Sinners in a movie hall earlier this year, I only had one complaint: the lighting. Everything else – the storyline, the world-building, the heartbreak and fury – was masterful and delicately crafted. But visually, something didn’t sit right.

The beautifully composed shots seemed to lose their clarity on the big screen. My disappointment with the Ryan Coogler-directed film was however quickly drowned in its historical discourse.

Then, weeks later, this time with a much better understanding of the Jim Crow time period, I streamed the film again, illegally, on a low-resolution site and suddenly, it looked different. Better, even. The nuance of shadows, the glint in Little Sammy’s eyes, the surreal contrast in the climactic scene were all more vivid and comprehensible.

Was it my eyes? The quality of the theatre projector? The dimmed ambience of a multiplex? Puzzled, I typed into Google: ‘Sinners lighting issues’. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed.

Across Reddit threads and forums, viewers shared vastly different experiences of the film’s lighting, some called it “unwatchably dark”, others “visually perfect”. A few even praised the director’s moody aesthetic. But the divisiveness revealed a deeper problem.

Why is it that the lighting of dark-skinned characters remains so inconsistent, so dependent on the screen we’re watching it on? This isn’t usually the case with white-passing characters. What does this say about the apparatus of cinema itself?

The issue isn’t just aesthetic – it’s systemic. For decades, film and photography technologies were designed around White skin. The iconic Shirley Card, a reference card used in labs to calibrate colour in photographs, featured a White woman (Shirley) with porcelain skin and chestnut brown hair.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Kodak finally responded to complaints from photographers working in Africa and chocolate manufacturers (who noticed their products looked dull on film) by creating multiracial Shirley cards.

Lighting dark skin isn’t about simply increasing brightness. As cinematographer Bradford Young once explained, “Light has to caress Black skin.” Black skin doesn’t just absorb light differently; it reflects it differently, too. Techniques that work well for White actors like flat lighting or front-facing key lights often erase the depth and contour of darker skin tones.

In his pathbreaking 1997 book White, Richard Dyer explains this systemic bias in a chapter titled ‘Light of the World’. He argues that innovations in photography, though presented as purely scientific, were shaped by social constructs that centred Whiteness. Cameras and film were designed to highlight and enhance White features, often making fair people appear even fairer, while failing to accurately capture darker skin tones.

This flaw presents challenges when light and dark bodies share a frame: increase the exposure for the lighter skin, and the darker skin disappears into shadow. Adjust exposure for the darker skin, and white skin can become blown out, almost ghostly.

This technical bias challenges the notion that cameras are neutral tools, showing instead that photographic technology perpetuates racial discrimination. The problem lies not in the colour of the skin but in technology that has been developed keeping only one skin colour in mind.

It’s not just White filmmakers or fashion editors who fail to light dark skin with dignity. The problem is structural. Even Black creatives, trained within predominantly White institutions, sometimes fall into the same traps.

As Leticia Wiggins argued in her 2022 Al Jazeera essay, representation alone cannot undo the embedded Whiteness of cinematic norms. She refers to the February 2022 British Vogue cover to remind us that representation isn’t liberation.

The cover, which featured nine dark-skinned models and had a Black creative director, was lauded by some for its visibility and historic casting. But many viewers – particularly Black women – criticised the image for its near-monochrome palette, eerily dark lighting, and Eurocentric styling.

Rather than celebrating Black beauty in its fullness, the photograph flattened it into something gothic and alien. The image reflected a kind of visual violence. The darkness wasn’t a celebration; it was a concealment, its critics said.

Systems of visual culture are not neutral; they are inherited, codified, and taught through predominantly White frameworks. Black filmmakers like Coogler, even with the best intentions, often work within an infrastructure built for and around White aesthetics.

This brings us back to my original experience: how I perceived the film differently depending on the screen. In the theatre, Sinners felt dark and muddled. On my laptop, things looked richer. As many Reddit users also noted, their theatrical experience of the film felt underwhelming, with the care and detail of its lighting design lost in translation.

Here, the democratisation of technology becomes a double-edged sword. Today, films are consumed on every kind of screen from IMAX to iPhones, Yet, not all screens are created equal, and most aren’t calibrated to honour the complexity of lighting darker skin tones.

For me, the only redemption to the lighting issue in Sinners came in its climactic fight sequence. Here, Remmick – the devil figure, a White man cloaked in rage – is only seen alongside the Black protagonist in the final act. The decision is no coincidence. By saving this shared frame for the final scene, Coogler sidesteps the most challenging lighting dilemma for most of the film.

And when the moment comes, the lighting choice is purposeful: the fair-skinned Remmick is slightly overexposed, while Sammy’s dread-filled face is carved out of deep shadow, viscerally illuminated by firelight.

This isn’t just aesthetic, it’s narrative. The cinematography aligns with the story’s moral polarity. It also shows how the challenge of contrasting skin tones can be transformed into creative storytelling. That said, this kind of careful craft is rarely the standard.

The problem is not just about representation in front of or behind the camera. It’s about the entire infrastructure of cinema: the tools, the training, the algorithms, the default colour profiles. Lighting is not a technical footnote but a political choice, one that can either erase or empower. Until we develop new lenses, literally, to see one another, cinema will continue to betray some of its most beautiful faces.

Rugmini Kalithodi is currently an undergraduate student at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. She likes to spend her time deep diving into anything and everything cultural studies.