Exposing Latent Images: Daguerreotypes in the Museum and Beyond
When:
Tuesday, Nov 29, 2016 6:00p -
7:30p
Tuesday, Nov 29, 2016 6:00p -
7:30p
Where:
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology Geological Lecture Hall
24 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/exposing-latent-images
Among the Peabody Museum’s most important and controversial objects are fifteen daguerreotypes of African and African-American slaves from 1850, taken by Joseph Zealy. They were acquired by Louis Agassiz, the first director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), who hoped they would bolster the erroneous theory of polygenesis which held that people of different races were of different species. A contemporary of Darwin’s, Agassiz never published these images and they remained unexamined until discovered in a Peabody attic in 1976. Ilisa Barbash will discuss how scholars and artists have used these portraits in discussions and depictions of race, photography, vision, gender, power, the body, and anthropology.
617-496-1027, [email protected]
