This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Today we're going to start back in the 1970s at a Catholic school in South Los Angeles.

It is Picture Day and all of the kids are filing

into the school auditorium in their uniforms. They're wearing powder blue sweaters,

white shirts, and dark corduroies. And there would be a photographer, they there usually a white guy.

This is Ibarrio next Pirello who attended the school.

And they would just march all the students in and you would sit on this stool and have you look at the camera and he would make a couple of pops to the flash and then you were done.

After a few weeks, the students would get their photos back in a big envelope towards the end of the

school day and everybody wanted to share what everyone else's photographs

look like they wanted to see what what do your pictures look like and the the kids who had darker skin tone were always just there was always a kind of

negative reaction to that.

Because the kids with lighter skin looked basically like themselves, but the kids with darker skin looked way darker than they did in real life.

A lot of the detail in their faces was just lost in the shadows.

And the kids, kids could be cruel. was just

kids could be cruel. You know they oh you look so dark you look so black. You know that was the first sense that there was something different

about how people look in in in photo that experience stuck with him, but Pirello didn't realize why this was happening until later in his life.

When Pirello got a little older, he learned how to use a camera.

Reporter Kai McNamee.

And the process of creating an image out of nothing just seemed like magic to him.

Because as a young kid, I stuttered and I'm very insecure.

Photography gave me my voice.

What I kind of lacked at the time in terms of being able to communicate in words.

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