Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism

The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism

Huerta, Monica

Hardcover

Series: America and the Long 19th Century, Book 26

Art Criticism & TheoryPhotography History & Criticism

ISBN10: 1479812420
ISBN13: 9781479812424
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: Jun 6 2023
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.36
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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 modernity--industrialization, racialization, and capitalism--were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself--and so the history of racial capitalism--up. 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 control's absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making.

The Unintended proposes that tracking and analyzing the sensed horizons of intention, control, autonomy, will, and volition offers another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique historical reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives.

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