Tailoring Freedom / Pictures of a Reparation
Tailoring Freedom
In March 1850 Louis Agassiz (1870 –1873) commissioned J.T. Zealy (1812–1893) to photograph enslaved people on the Edgehill plantation in South Carolina, USA. Utilising the technology of photography as part of his eugenics campaign, Agassiz chose seven enslaved individuals – Alfred, Fassena, Jem, Jack, and his daughter Drana, Renty and his daughter Delia. In an attempt to prove his theories of black inferiority, the seven were then forced to pose in Zealy’s studio.
Agassiz’s son, Alexander, donated these images in 1858 to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University, USA, where Agassiz was a professor and Founding Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Since they were rediscovered in the Museum in the late 1970s these works have been the centre of urgent debates about photography ever since. To reclaim their freedom, which was never granted during their lifetimes, Tamara Lanier, the great- great-great granddaughter of Renty, filed a lawsuit in March 2019 against Harvard University to repatriate the daguerreotypes of her ancestors held in the collection. Tailoring Freedom addresses the problematic legacy of the naturalist Agassiz and adopts Huber’s notion of using art to heal colonial traumas. In this series of seven portraits, Huber weaves together her signature stapling method and photography for the first time. In the works depicting Renty and Delia for example, Huber reproduced and printed the photographs on wood, ‘dressing’ Renty in a suit worn by Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), and Delia in a dress worn by Harriet Tubman (c.1820 –1913), honouring the contributions of Douglass and Tubman, both abolitionists.
Pictures of a Reparation
Pictures of a Reparation features footage from a press conference held in Boston by American descendants of Louis Agassiz in the presence of descendants of Renty and Delia Taylor, Tamara Lanier and daughters Megan and Shonreal. Following Tamara Lanier’s lawsuit against Harvard University made in 2019, forty-three descendants of Agassiz penned and signed an open letter to Harvard in solidarity with Lanier, requesting that the daguerreotypes of her ancestors be given to her. This gesture, they wrote, “would begin to make amends for [Harvard University’s] use of the photos as exhibits for the white supremacist theory Agassiz espoused. It is time for Harvard to recognize Renty and Delia as people.” In their letter, Agassiz’s descendants condemned Harvard’s racist past and urged the University to take the necessary steps towards “reckoning and repair.”
In May 2025 Harvard finally agreed to relinquish the entire fifteen part series known under the name Slave Daguerreotype series to the IAAM – International African American Museum in South Carolina. The museum will work in close collaboration with Tamara Lanier to ensure the right way to present and discuss these violent archives in the right context with the needed care. It is a landmark win and a move in the right direction.