“An exhibition often tends to be the voice of the museum or the curators. “We came to understand that because so many people had different perspectives on the daguerreotypes, that perhaps starting with a book might be a better idea,” she remembers. When the daguerreotypes were undergoing conservation more than a decade ago, Barbash and her colleagues initially thought they would create an exhibit about them.
Various scholars and artists have since responded to the images in their work they’re also the subject of a lawsuit filed last year by Tamara Lanier, who says she’s a descendant of Renty and Delia (Renty’s daughter) and argues that the photographs should belong to the subjects’ descendants, not to Harvard.
So these “most challenging images,” as the Peabody Museum describes them, were filed away and forgotten, until they were rediscovered in 1976. He had already been rebuked by audiences in the North for his claims of polygenesis, writes historian Molly Rogers in a chapter for To Make Their Own Way in the World. No notes from that meeting exist, but it’s likely that the attendees were deeply uncomfortable with his ideas. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to reprocess the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us.”Īgassiz presented the Zealy daguerreotypes just once, at a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Club in 1850 they were never published. In an oft-quoted 1846 letter to his mother, written soon after arriving in the United States, he declared: “It was in Philadelphia that I first found myself in prolonged contact with negroes…I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type and the unique origin of our species….I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they are really men. But whatever scientific evidence Agassiz believed underlay his research on race, his ideas were profoundly shaped by his racist instincts and emotions. There is no way for me to ever understand that.”Īgassiz, who was one of the most prominent biologists of the nineteenth century and a proponent of polygenesis, or the idea that different human races had different biological origins, commissioned the daguerreotypes to support his hypothesis. “They did not let on that anything was amiss. “Even in a most vulnerable state, they were unflinching,” writes Keziah Clarke ’20 (who encountered the images in a course with history professor Robin Bernstein) of the enslaved subjects. Yet even after 400-plus pages, the violence of the photographs defies comprehension. Who are the individuals in these disturbing photos? Why did Agassiz commission them? What did he want them to show? What did nineteenth-century viewers see when they looked at them? These are some of the questions that the volume aims to answer. Barbash is one of the editors of To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, a new book of essays and original research on the photographs’ origins, their social context, and how-or whether-modern viewers are to look at them. Their seven subjects-Jack, Drana, Delia, Renty, Fassena, Foulah or Alfred, and Jem-stripped naked, stare straight into the camera, forcing the viewer to “look into the faces of people who were enslaved,” says Ilisa Barbash, curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Today, they’re the earliest known photographs of enslaved people. The 15 daguerreotypes of South Carolina slaves, taken by Joseph Zealy at the behest of Swiss-born Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850, have the eerie intimacy of mugshots. The pictures are spectral, disorienting portals into the slave South.
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