J.T. Zealy, “Renty, Congo. Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq.,” (frontal) March 1850.
Joseph T. Zealy took a series of daguerreotype portraits of African-American slaves in Columbia, S.C., in 1850. The photographs followed the frontal mug shot and profile conventions established for the identification of criminals. Pictured here is Renty, Congo plantation of B.F Taylor, Esq. This and other daguerreotypes will be on display at the Lakefront and Theater galleries.
J.T. Zealy, “Jack (driver), Guinea. Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq., Columbia, S.C.,” (frontal) March 1850.
J.T. Zealy, “Delia, country born of African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo. Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq.,” (frontal) March 1850
Black bodies, white science, Daguerreotypes by J.W. Zealy. Faces of Slavery
Consider the often illustrated example of the Zealy daguerreotypes, photographs of partially nude South Carolina plantation slaves that were commissioned in 1850 by the eminent Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz (and that ended up in the anthropology museum there). Ironically Agassiz wanted these photographs to be read as evidence—specifically as scientific evidence for polygenesis, the idea that human races had separate origins and were thus inescapably and irrevocably different. The chosen slaves, according to the captions found with the images, were either born in Africa or born of African parents. Somehow these images were supposed to convince presumably white viewers that the black African body was so alien that the African “race” must be, in effect, a separate species.
“A negroid type, you became a scientific profile, an anthropological debate & a photographic subject”
All of the quoted text below is taken from Chapter 1 of the book, Reading American Photographs: Images as History; Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, by Alan Trachtenberg (1989):
In March 1850, Louis Agassiz, celebrated Harvard natural scientist and widely admired Cambridge intellectual, arranged through the good offices of Dr. Robert W. Gibbes for a local daguerreotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, J.T. Zealy, to take a series of pictures of African-born slaves at nearby plantations. Zealy made the pictures in his studio, turned them over to Gibbes, who shipped them to Agassiz at Harvard, where in 1976, at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, they were found in storage cabinet.
