The Unintended

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 affir