By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, March 12 (Reuters) – Harvard has turned over what are believed to be the first photographs taken of enslaved people in the U.S. to a South Carolina museum after a settlement was reached last year under which the university agreed to give up ownership of the images.
An enslaved father and his daughter were forced to be photographed in 1850 for a racist study by a professor trying to prove the inferiority of Black people. In May 2025, Harvard agreed to give up ownership of the images to resolve a lawsuit by one of their descendants.
“More than 175 years after they were created in South Carolina, the 1850 Daguerreotypes, believed to be the earliest known photographs of enslaved people in the United States, have returned to the state where the individuals depicted were enslaved and forcibly photographed,” the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, said in a statement.
The images were being reframed “from instruments of pseudoscience into portraits honoring the lives and humanity of the individuals they captured,” the museum said.
The settlement was announced last year by the legal team representing Tamara Lanier, who had waged a six-year legal battle for what she said was a wrongful claim of ownership over photos that were taken without her ancestors’ consent.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard has said it had long been eager to place the photos with another public institution “to put them in the appropriate context and increase access to them for all Americans.”
Originally commissioned in 1850 by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz and photographed by Joseph Zealy in Columbia, South Carolina, the images were part of a scientific project intended to support theories of Black inferiority and polygenism, the museum said.
“Today, IAAM is transforming these images into portraits of remembrance and historical truth,” it added.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
