ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to step back from the drive to announce new beginnings or characterize the novelty of photographic tools or images. The condition of imperial modernity is to be always in motion, always in the process of expanding the new into new territories, always against local people’s laws, sometimes even against the laws of physics. Unlearning photography as a field apart means, first and foremost, foregrounding the regime of rights whose imposition on the world from which photography emerged was already naturalized and legalized. The context of Dominique Francois Arago’s speech enables one to reconstruct the regime of rights and privileges that were involved in the advocacy of photography. Photography was invented and instituted in a world that had been shaped through massive destruction and plunder of others. Potentializing the history of photography should involve an attempt to attend to the violence through which photographs could become its products, and be studied as such.
