The 1850 slave daguerreotypes were photography’s first racial-profiling documents

Evidence

It hit me then that these images were both among the first photographs ever taken of enslaved African people as well as the first documented examples of racial profiling. Photography was a new medium in the 1850s, and Agassiz used it to present these Black men and women not for who they were, but for who he wanted them to be. These were also the first mug shots. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 657

Categorization

• DEFINE: Signals the historical thesis that photography in Agassiz’s hands was a profiling instrument before it was a documentary one.
• XREF: Connects to the modern genre of institutional image-ownership histories and to how archives shape identity — parallels the reader’s own interest in property law as the afterlife of slavery.