Description
Book SynopsisReimagines photography through the long history of ideas of expression
The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernityindustrialization, racialization, and capitalismwere quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itselfand so the history of racial capitalismup. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership.
The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed
Trade Review
When you look at a photograph, whose expression do you see? This is a question of perception, but it is also a question of property rights. The Unintended considers ‘stories about photography’s history as property’ and shows how much is at stake when someone claims to own an image. Expression gives way to possession, and matters of law, credit, identity, and aesthetics all hang in the balance. Monica Huerta seems to deliver a surprising analytic turn on every page. This book made my head spin. -- Caleb Smith, author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
Wholly original and exciting. Tracking photography’s intersection with property law in the late nineteenth century U.S., The Unintended evolves genuinely new possibilities for thinking about the medium’s role in the construction of race. Monica Huerta addresses the workings of capital in relation to the medium—not only photography’s status as a commercial practice, but also how it took up and redefined the ways bodies could be regarded as property. Closely historicized yet wide-ranging in its implications, Huerta’s book models a profoundly ethical attention to what the photographic archive can reveal. -- Dana Luciano, Rutgers University
