To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes

Edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a photographic essay by Carrie Mae Weems

To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, 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.

This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume 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 today. With over two hundred illustrations, this book is firmly grounded in the events shaping American lives, and frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.