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Description of  The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (America and the Long 19th Century)

Reimagines 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 (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts. Emphasizing the making of expression into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on, this book argues that designations of controls absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making. Read more