In The Unintended; Photography, Property and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism, Monica Huerta delves deeply into the history of copyright law regarding photographic practices and aesthetics. Using the framework of racial capitalism, while noting that the understanding of this term has undergone much revision, she homes the meaning of its usefulness regarding making visible the production/extraction of the racialized body within the world of the copyright of photography.
Locating performative acts by and for the camera, Huerta gives us an interdisciplinary book that frames photographic material as crucial to how we understand artistic authorship culturally.
The lens Huerta provides allows the reader to make connections between the development of property rights and the effects of juridical power on photographic mediums. We return to the law as a series of interpretations that mobilize and give form to the photograph. Locating performative acts by and for the camera, Huerta gives us an interdisciplinary book that frames photographic material as crucial to how we understand artistic authorship culturally.
With playfulness and wit, she weaves queer performance theory with legal text making this an excellent read for scholars of theater, arts, and law. Zooming in on theories of the “optical unconscious,” which code a photo’s magic value with particular regard to a “legal unconscious,” Huerta offers a parallel to Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious.” Arguing that juridical understandings of expression in photographs should be considered within the colonial dispossessions of their make and that photos even rely on these dispossessions for their existence and meaning. That being said, this book is for the deep reader who loves a good, thick footnote and a mouthful of theory.
With playfulness and wit, [Huerta] weaves queer performance theory with legal text making this an excellent read for scholars of theater, arts, and law.
Giving light on photography’s place within a “racial regime of ownership” where ownership results from legal justifications bound to private property, she uses examples like the portraits of Oscar Wilde taken by photographer Napoleon Sarony. Shot eight years before Wilde’s work The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the Irish satirist was a minor celebrity at the time, only known as a great conversationalist. (One can guess that sitting for these photos was of some inspiration?) The photos (ca 1882) ended up shaping photographic law as we know it. The photo was so charming that a men’s clothing store company paid for more prints from the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. without Sarony’s permission- distributing over 85,000 copies by the time of the suit. This was during a period when many questioned the creative possibility of the photograph as art, all of which, in turn, dictated who would benefit from its reproduction. It is so fascinating to see the bones of copyright law in a photograph– especially one of a sitter whose queer, raced body was so utterly desired- so much so that copies of it caused a legal battle.
The Unintended; Photography, Property and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism is full of vignettes on the law of photography, like that of Wilde’s, giving us a queer history of the object of the photo in circulation. As a thing that moves, whose movement has serious monetary value and legal consequences.
