The 19th-century Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz was a revered figure at Harvard University. He was also a racist who commissioned humiliating photographs of slaves and Brazilian natives.
A century and a half after their creation, the images still haunt....
Now, those images are at the center of a dispute between Harvard, which owns them, and the organizer of an exhibit on Agassiz and his racism that opens this week in Grindelwald, Switzerland....
The tale of the images begins in 1850, when Agassiz, a Harvard professor, hired a South Carolina man named J.T. Zealy to make a series of daguerreotypes of slaves standing unclothed, shot from several angles.
By that time, Agassiz had already made several public statements — shocking to read today, but less so in his day. For instance, in 1846, according to the Harvard scholar Louis Menand, Agassiz said he believed that blacks and whites were different species. A year later, Agassiz told a Charleston, S.C., audience that “the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven months’ infant in the womb of a White.”
But Agassiz had not finished developing his racist theories by 1850. He wanted visual evidence for them, and in Zealy he thought he had found the man to produce it.
Fifteen years later, Agassiz led an expedition to Brazil. Among the photographs of flora and fauna taken on the expedition were other images, of native people. Many, as in the Zealy daguerreotypes, were stripped to show the physical differences that Agassiz believed he saw.
Agassiz’ views on race may have left some of his colleagues disquieted. But not many.
“Agassiz’ racism was extreme in the sense that he used his public stature as a scientist to propagate and, in a bizarre way, to ‘prove’ it,” said Christoph Irmscher, an Indiana University professor and author of a new biography of Agassiz. “But his views were not extraordinarily different from the racism many of his contemporaries displayed at the time.”
The global warmer of his day?
Instead of being condemned, Agassiz became famous, and at the time of his death in 1873 was considered America’s leading scientist. His admirers named many landmarks for him, including a Cambridge street, a Swiss mountain, the world-class Harvard zoology museum he founded, and a public school that was later renamed.
Wow.
But no one kept track of the images from South Carolina and Brazil. They disappeared for decades, surfacing only when a Peabody employee discovered them in a storage cabinet at the Harvard museum in 1976.
Their significance was immediately apparent. They were some of the earliest known images of American slaves, milestones in the histories of race and photography. They were also visually striking. Many of their subjects stared at the camera with undeniable dignity despite their humiliating circumstances.
“Agassiz was trying to dehumanize these subjects in an anthropological or medical way,” said John Stauffer, chairman of Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization, who plans to mount his own exhibit on the images within the next year. “The rich irony is, what comes through is these individuals’ humanity.”
Yet the images are, no doubt, disturbing. Displaying them widely, some believe, may come with a price.
“These are images that were meant to denigrate people,” said Irmscher, who chose to show only one of them in his new book. “I am deeply appreciative of the efforts to expose Agassiz’ motives, but there’s a thin line between documenting the extent of his racism and perpetuating it by making these photographs public again.”
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All of which raises the question of why the Swiss group cannot show them.
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Related: Harvard should openly discuss Louis Agassiz and his racial attitudes
