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Join volume editors Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis for a conversation about the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World, copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press. Moderated by Sarah Meister.
To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, the images were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976.
To Make Their Own Way in the World features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities and experiences of the seven people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race in the nineteenth century, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects, as well as the ways contemporary artists have used the daguerreotypes to critique institutional racism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.
Instead of supporting Agassiz’s pseudoscientific notions about white supremacy and racial hierarchies, as was their original intent, the daguerreotypes provoke wide-ranging interpretation and raise critical questions about representation and identity. “At this moment and in these divided states of America, perhaps more than at any time since their rediscovery in 1976,” Molly Rogers writes, “the daguerreotypes of Jem, Alfred, Delia, Renty, George Fassena, Drana, and Jack command our attention, demanding that we look closely, listen intently, and speak out—however difficult this may be—giving voice to all that we have learned.”
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Ilisa Barbash is visual anthropology curator at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and author of Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (2016).
Molly Rogers is associate director of the Center for the Humanities, New York University, and author of Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2010).
Deborah Willis is chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and coauthor of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2013).
Sarah Meister is photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and author of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020) and Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Hampton Album (2019).
