Harvard relinquishes possession of slave photos after years-long dispute

By Angie Orellana Hernandez and Rachel Hatzipanagos, Washington Post

The settlement is a legal victory for Tamara Lanier, who sued Harvard University for ownership of images that featured her purported enslaved ancestors. Harvard said it has not confirmed her ancestry.

Centuries-old images of an enslaved man and his daughter, believed to be the earliest-known photographs of enslaved people in the United States, were relinquished by Harvard University after a 15-year-long legal battle.

Connecticut woman Tamara Lanier says she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty Taylor, an enslaved man photographed nude alongside his daughter in the winter of 1850 in images commissioned by a Harvard scientist, Louis Agassiz. She sued Harvard for ownership of the photos in 2019.

The images were part of a collection of daguerreotypes, an early photographic process, that Agassiz commissioned in an attempt to support a pseudoscientific theory known as “polygenism,” which falsely states that African-descended people are inferior to White people. Renty and other enslaved men and women were taken to a studio, stripped and forced to reveal every body part, including their genitals.

Fifteen images of seven people commissioned by Agassiz will be transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Harvard will retain legal ownership of the images, said Josh Koskoff, Lanier’s attorney.

Learn what will happen after the museum receives the photos.

Discover what happened during the nearly three centuries of enslavement in the US.

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