by Valentina Di Liscia, HYPERALLERGIC.
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 images were created as part of so-called “experiments” in support of pseudoscientific theories of White racial superiority of which Agassiz was a proponent.