Harvard sued by ‘descendant’ of slave for profiting from photos

The haunting daguerreotypes of seven enslaved men and women taken in South Carolina in 1850 have long been an awkward matter at Harvard. Made in a portrait studio at the request of Louis Agassiz, a renowned Harvard biologist out to prove the inferiority of people of African descent, the images have been the subject of scholarly exposes and intellectual property skirmishes since they resurfaced in 1976 in the attic of the university’s anthropology museum. Now they are the subject of a lawsuit brought by a Connecticut woman who says she is a descendant of two of the enslaved people in the photographs, and wants what she sees as her stolen family property back.

The lawsuit involves charges of profiteering and exploitation, calling the images “spoils of theft” and Harvard’s “dominion” over them itself the equivalent of slavery.

But to scholars, it also raises broader moral questions. Who owns African-American history: the generally white-dominated institutions that house many of its traces, or the descendants of the enslaved? And who, if anyone, should control — and profit from — it?

The lawsuit, which demands that Harvard relinquish the daguerreotypes and pay unspecified punitive and emotional damages, faces an uphill battle. Kevin Mattei, a lawyer on Long Island who represents auction houses, said that “slavery was a travesty, but the law is crystal clear.” “The person who hits the shutter button and takes the photograph is the one who owns the copyright on the image,” Mattei said. “That’s 100% the law, and it’s been the law forever.”

As for the question of who owns the physical daguerreotypes, Mattei said that the only way the plaintiff could claim ownership is by proving that the photographer had given them to the enslaved people who sat for them, Renty and Delia, rather than to Agassiz. But to some scholars of slavery, legal arguments are not really the point. The lawsuit, they say, needs to be understood not just in the context of law, but in the broader history of African-American dispossession.

Harvard’s policies over the Agassiz images, which show their subjects stripped to the waist, seem to have evolved in response to shifting sensitivities. And in recent years, Harvard has quietly abandoned the copyright claims on the Agassiz images that it used to aggressively enforce.