10/02/2026
For more than six years, Tamara Lanier fought Harvard University over photographs of her ancestors, Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, who were photographed in South Carolina in 1850 without their consent. The images were commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz as part of a racist attempt to use photography to support theories of racial hierarchy and Black inferiority. Harvard’s own research now acknowledges that the university has a long history of connections to slavery and that Agassiz participated in abusive race science, including the photographing of enslaved people.
In 2025, Harvard reached a settlement with Lanier and agreed to relinquish ownership of the daguerreotypes, along with photographs of five other enslaved people. The images were transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, where they can be preserved and presented with greater historical context. The settlement did not simply hand the photographs personally to Lanier, but her six-year legal fight helped bring the question of who should control and interpret these deeply painful images into the national conversation.
What makes this history especially important is that these photographs are among the earliest known photographs of enslaved people in the United States. For generations, the people pictured were often discussed through the records and institutions of those who enslaved or studied them rather than through their own lives, families and identities. Lanier’s case was therefore about more than photographs. It raised difficult questions about descendants, historical memory, ownership, dignity and who gets to tell the stories of people who were denied the ability to tell their own.
