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Alfred delia baseball 202112/3/2023 ![]() 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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