Photography

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.

What compels us to look at shocking photographs or, alternatively, to look away? Should the media use disturbing images to inform, at the risk of offending? How is our sense of politics, morality, and culture affected when we are exposed to gruesome images of accidents and disasters, murder and execution, grief and death?
In Body Horror, John Taylor addresses these questions by examining how the media presents unsettling pictures, especially those of dead and injured "foreigners." Drawing on recent experiences in the Gulf, Bosnia and Rwanda, Taylor argues that documentary photography, for all the horror it reproduces, ultimately defines a democracy.
Fully aware of the voyeuristic aspects of photojournalism, Taylor probes the difficulty of applying moral imperatives when separating the utility of showing images of suffering and violence from the risk of either insulting or gratifying public sensibilities. A compelling documentary of photography's cultural and political power, Body Horror analyzes the moral responsibility attached to publishing and bearing witness to photographs of violence, and the historical amnesia that arises when such imagery remains unseen.