Ending a six-year battle that stirred ethical and legal debates about the ownership of photographs taken under duress, Harvard University has surrendered its claim to 15 daguerreotypes at the center of a lawsuit brought by Tamara Lanier, a descendant of enslaved individuals.
Lanier sued the school for wrongful possession and expropriation in 2019, two years after discovering that photographs held at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology depicted her great-great-great grandfather Renty and his daughter, Delia, who were enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina.
Commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz and taken by Joseph T. Zealy in 1850, the daguerreotypes show Renty and Delia stripped to the waist. The images were created as part of so-called “experiments” in support of pseudoscientific theories of White racial superiority of which Agassiz was a proponent.
Now, the photos of Delia, Renty, and others in Harvard’s custody for nearly two centuries are expected to be transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, in a hard-fought settlement that Lanier called “a turning point in American history.”
IAAM’s President and CEO Dr. Tonya M. Matthews: “It is critical that images such as these never be forgotten, abused, or have their stories slip into untold history. IAAM is committed to holding these objects with dignity, empathy, truth and respect. It is a weighty privilege to become home to these challenging, but precious artifacts, and we are incredibly proud to have these daguerreotypes into our collection.”
Lanier first asked Harvard to return the images in 2017, a request the school denied, questioning her ancestral claims. Her lawsuit was initially dismissed by a court that cited precedents establishing photographs as “the property of the photographer.”
