Harvard Relinquishes Possession of Slave Photos After Years-long Dispute

The settlement is a legal victory for Tamara Lanier, who sued Harvard University for ownership of images that featured her purported enslaved ancestors. Harvard said it has not confirmed her ancestry.

May 28, 2025 at 5:47 p.m. EDT

By Angie Orellana Hernandez and Rachel Hatzipanagos

Centuries-old images of an enslaved man and his daughter, believed to be the earliest-known photographs of enslaved people in the United States, were relinquished by Harvard University after a 15-year-long legal battle.

Connecticut woman Tamara Lanier says she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty Taylor, an enslaved man photographed nude alongside his daughter in the winter of 1850 in images commissioned by a Harvard scientist, Louis Agassiz. She sued Harvard for ownership of the photos in 2019.

The images were part of a collection of daguerreotypes, an early photographic process, that Agassiz commissioned in an attempt to support a pseudoscientific theory known as “polygenism,” which falsely states that African-descended people are inferior to White people. Renty and other enslaved men and women were taken to a studio, stripped and forced to reveal every body part, including their genitals.

Fifteen images of seven people commissioned by Agassiz will be transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Harvard will retain legal ownership of the images, said Josh Koskoff, Lanier’s attorney.

“In terms of getting beyond that dispute and towards the goal of liberating these images from Harvard’s clutches, my client was willing to forgo a battle over ‘ownership,’” Koskoff said.

The identities of others in the photographs are known “as a matter of historical record,” but there are currently no plans to publicly share their names, Koskoff said. Once the photos are placed at the South Carolina museum, perhaps “there will be a genuine interest in finding descendants, and it won’t take lawsuits to motivate that interest,” he said.

The International African American Museum is “incredibly proud” to add the daguerreotypes to its collection, Tonya M. Matthews, chief executive of the museum, said in a statement. “It is a weighty privilege to become home to these challenging, but precious artifacts.”

In 2021, Lanier told The Washington Post that she grew up hearing stories about “Papa Renty” and how he had been kidnapped from the Congo River basin. Lanier said she became aware of the photos while doing genealogical research.

The images were lost until 1976, when an employee of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the late Ellie Reichlin, discovered them in a corner cabinet of the museum’s attic. The images were put on display, and anyone wanting to use the images was required to pay the university.

For years, Lanier attempted to share her genealogical research with the university but was ignored, according to her attorneys. In 2019, she filed a lawsuit against the college at a time where many universities were reckoning with their own contributions toward slavery and white supremacy.

In 2022, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that Lanier could sue Harvard for emotional distress after the Ivy League school disregarded her requests for information and declined to acknowledge her ancestral claim to the images. However, Justice Scott Kafker wrote in his opinion at the time that Lanier did not have a right to ownership since she was not a descendant of the photographer or the photograph’s owners.

The agreement announced Wednesday settles the lawsuit.

In a statement, a spokesman for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, James Chisholm, said the school is working with the museum to ensure the transfer to South Carolina, the state where the images were taken 175 years ago.

“Harvard University has long been eager to place the Zealy Daguerreotypes with another museum or other public institution to put them in the appropriate context and increase access to them for all Americans,” Chisholm said in the statement, referring to the man who took the photographs, Joseph T. Zealy.

However, the school continues to assert it can’t prove that Lanier is related to Renty.

“Harvard has not been able to confirm that Ms. Lanier is related to the individuals in the daguerreotypes,” the statement reads.

At a news conference Wednesday, Lanier called Harvard’s decision to move the images a win for all descendants of enslaved people.

“This landmark settlement is not just a victory of my family, it’s a victory for every descendant who has carried the weight of a stolen past and dared to demand it back,” she said.