Ilisa Barbash, curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, will discuss the research and work behind the production of the book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press 2020), which features essays by prominent scholars from the disciplines of history, anthropology, art history and American studies. 

The book is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: 15 daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Made in 1850 by photographer Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, the daguerreotypes were rediscovered at the Peabody Museum in 1976.

This talk will highlight some of its various topics, including the identities of the seven people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race in the 19th century, and the ways contemporary artists have used the daguerreotypes to critique institutional racism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Ilisa Barbash is curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She co-directed, with Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the films In and Out of Africa (1992) and Sweetgrass (2009,) which was nominated as best documentary film for the Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham Award, IDA Documentary Award, and Cinema Eye Awards. Showcase. With Castaing-Taylor she co-wrote Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Video (1997) and co-edited The Cinema of Robert Gardner (2007). Barbash’s book Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (Peabody Museum Press, 2016) was the recipient of the Society for Visual Anthropology’s 2017 John Collier Junior Award for visual excellence in the use of still photography. She is a co-writer and co-editor, with Deborah Willis and Molly Rogers, of To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (2020, Aperture/Peabody Museum Press) which received first prize in the 2021 Rencontres d’Arles Photographic Book Awards (historical).

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