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

To Make Their Own Way in the World 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, they 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 of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.

Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

Author: Ilisa Barbash
Publisher: Aperture
Published: 09/22/2020
Pages: 488
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.40lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.90w x 1.90d
ISBN: 9781597114783

About the Author
Barbash, Ilisa: - Ilisa Barbash is curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She is codirector of the films In and Out of Africa (1992) and Sweetgrass (2009). Barbash is the author of Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (2016), which was awarded the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography.Rogers, Molly: - Molly Rogers is a writer and independent scholar of American history and the history and theory of photography. She is the author of Delia's Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2010), on the Peabody Museum's daguerreotypes of enslaved Africans and African Americans. Rogers is associate director of the Center for the Humanities at New York University.Willis, Deborah: - Deborah Willis is a professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She received the NAACP Image Award for her coauthored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2013). Other notable publications include Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot" (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009). Willis has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
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