To Make Their Own Way in the World

To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the early history of photography. The fifteen daguerreotypes—made in 1850 by photographer Joseph T. Zealy—portray Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty, men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Since 1976, when the daguerreotypes were rediscovered at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, the photographs have been the subject of intense and widespread study. To Make Their Own Way in the World features essays by prominent scholars who explore everything from the photographs’ historical context and the "science” of race to the ways in which photography created a visual narrative of slavery and its effects. Multidisciplinary, deeply collaborative, and with more than two hundred illustrations, including new photography by contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent contemporary inquiry.

Ilisa Barbash is visual anthropology curator at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and author of Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (2016).

Molly Rogers is associate director of the Center for the Humanities, New York University, and author of Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2010).

Deborah Willis is chair of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery(2013).

Carrie Mae Weems is an influential contemporary American artist and author of The Hampton Project (Aperture, 2001), Kitchen Table Series (2016), and Strategies of Engagement (2018).

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.