The 1850 daguerreotypes were produced to prove white racial superiority.

Evidence

The next paragraph sickened me: “The daguerreotypes, which were taken for Agassiz in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850, had two purposes, one nominally scientific, the other frankly political. They were designed to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same time they were meant to prove the superiority of the white race. Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory of ‘separate creation,’ the idea that the various races of mankind were in fact separate species.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 152