Blurring or Focusing Enslavement: Photography and The Color Black

In May 2025, Tamara Lanier’s court cases against Harvard University for the possession of daguerreotypes featuring her ancestors finally resulted in a settlement. These high-profile cases, which hinged on her familial claims to two photographs in Harvard’s collections, have inspired conversations around archival practices, ownership, and consent in photography. In the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz had photographs taken of enslaved African Americans, including two named Delia and Renty, as proof of polygenesis theory and, in turn, their “necessary” enslavement. Agassiz left these photographs to Harvard. In 2019, Lanier, a descendant of Delia and Renty who grew up hearing stories about “Papa Renty” from her grandmother, sued Harvard for the photographs. Her six-year battle with the university brought a watershed moment for archives and the photography of enslaved people: Harvard would relinquish the daguerreotypes, which would be transferred to the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.[1]

Lanier had been in the throes of her court cases against Harvard as I wrote The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran and wrestled with how I would include photographs in my book. How does one approach images of enslavement, created under conditions of non-consent? I came to define enslavement and abolition in Iran through the concepts of forced visibility and forced invisibility, and photography was critical to both. Enslavement was a process of forced visibility that capitalized on the enslaved person’s racial distinction from their enslavers to identify them as not only Black, but also as enslaved. After the Manumission Law of 1929, however, abolition was a process of forced invisibility; within a matter of decades, references to enslavement and Black people were completely erased from the national landscape. These erasures were so pervasive scholars and archivists regularly suggested that I would not find anything about these subjects. Yet when I arrived in Iran for my fieldwork, I found photograph after photograph of enslaved Black people, some alongside others, some solo, staring back at me from behind and within the archival walls and frames.

Photography became a critical source base for my work. Prior to abolition, Iranians trained themselves to see race in photography, to structure images around racial constructions. After abolition, they trained themselves to see past it. Photography became a technology through which people learned and communicated racial (and racist) discernment through the production and circulation of the image. The ubiquity of enslaved people in photographs recalled how wealthy Iranians valued both enslavement and photography as a means of projecting prestige and status during the nineteenth century. The manner in which the photographs had since been organized in the archives, however, revealed how little attention had been given to them since Iranians chose to forget this period of history. In the absence of systemic categorization, I would sometimes stumble upon the photographs by accident; other times I would find them in the “Women’s Albums,” where they had been placed because of their proximity to women and their domestic work. It became clear that the enslaved were not only marginalized in their lifetimes, but also in the writing of history.

Most scholarship on the history of enslavement in Iran glosses over race, and even more frustratingly, most scholarship on Iranian history does not mention slavery at all, implicitly influenced by Pahlavi-era nationalist discourses and narratives that downplayed histories of enslavement and promoted ideas of Aryan supremacy. Because Persian and other Middle Eastern languages do not have direct equivalents for translating race, racialization, or racism, some scholars have wielded the lack of vocabulary as proof of its immateriality. Instead, I turned toward the visual to probe what has been unsaid. I argued that the presence and erasure of racial enslavement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was critical to modern Iranian history, and I weighed what kinds of memories and histories these photographs carried. But the question remained: what role would images of enslavement have in my book, given such images’ problems of control and consent—so powerfully demonstrated by Lanier’s cases against Harvard?

Seeing Photographs

Once the camera was invented in 1837, it arrived swiftly to Iran in 1841 and was placed in the hands of the young prince Nasir al-Din. During his reign as Shah from 1848–1896, photography rose as an activity and object of interest among wealthy Iranians. Enslaved East Africans were not only photographed in this period, but they were also among the first people to be photographed in Iran, alongside their enslavers, royals or wealthy members of society. East Africans especially were enslaved in Iran as wet nurses, cooks, nannies, escorts, messengers, housekeepers, and in other roles critical to the management of day-to-day domestic life. The presence of the enslaved in the home, and their role as escorts of their enslavers outside of the home, rendered their visibility critical to their enslavement. The advent of photography, paired with East Africans becoming the last remaining people to be enslaved in Iran, shaped the norms around how enslaved people were seen in both public and private spaces. Being seen—displayed—was indeed integral to their enslavement.

After abolition in 1929, however, racialized enslavement in Iran became governed by a forced invisibility. Iranians—both Black and non-Black—all received citizenship at the same time in the 1930s, and although no system of Jim Crow was legally established in Iran, Black Iranians were forgotten on a national scale. They instead dealt with day-to-day racist encounters that placed social and economic limits on their lives. From the 1950s onwards, non-Black Iranians embraced racist, supremacist ideas that Iranians are ethnically white Aryans, pushed claims that Cyrus the Great had freed all the slaves 2,500 years ago, and even published new dictionary definitions of slavery that restricted its meaning to plantation slavery in the United States. In a similar vein, despite photography’s unique purchase on indexical visibility, photographs of enslaved Black people in Iran have, paradoxically, been used to erase the history of their enslavement.

It was this history, this wielding of imagery, that made me follow Lanier’s case carefully while thinking about how to approach the photography of enslavement. As I read about Lanier’s case in the media, scholarly works shaped my approach and methodology as well. In The Color Black, I mention two works that were crucial to my thinking about the stakes of either eliding or omitting enslavement photographs: Jarrett Drake’s “Blood at the Root,” which discusses Lanier’s court case against Harvard in the context of archival praxis, and Temi Odumosu’s “The Crying Child,” on mass historical reproductions and subsequent digital reproductions of a photograph of a young Caribbean child in the earlier twentieth century.[2] The articles omit or blur the images in question, a visual reminder to the reader—either in their altered state or their absence—to consider what they may be seeking to see.

I wondered: was there an interventionist approach that would effectively address the histories of race, enslavement, power, and kinship that produced these images? Inspired by Odumosu’s blurred photographs, I did simple tracings and blurred the images I was studying (figs. 1–4). I wanted to keep the shapes of the figures’ bodies but to avoid exposing their identities. I considered using outlines, blurred images, or a combination of both. The resulting images sloughed off details and lost layers of texture while highlighting sharp contrasts. In some examples, the blur smoothed out skin tones and produced racially vague images. At once, the outlines called attention to the spatial arrangement of these portraits, which appear as a formulaic visual language: the enslavers sat, the enslaved stood. And yet, while I intended for the anonymization to protect the enslaved—whose photographs were taken without their clear consent—it also served to protect the identities of the enslavers.

As I considered my options, I also thought about the image of a young girl in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, whose presentation sharply contrasted with Drake’s and Odumosu’s examples. In a photograph from the turn of the century, a young Black girl—maybe seven or eight years old—lies naked on a sofa, her eyes looking straight at the camera, operated by a man decades older than her. The photo is from the turn of the century, and as such, the unnamed girl in the photograph was not enslaved, though it is clear she was not exactly free. Hartman notes that in 1883, the age of consent was ten years old. Was this child yet ten? It is an immaterial question, as it does not justify what we can see and cannot see in the photograph. In her book, Hartman covers two full pages of text with the image, overlaying her prose on the young girl’s face, her body, her “small arms tucked tight against her torso like clipped wings.”[3] Hartman not only shows this photograph—overflowing with racial and sexual violence—but also forces us to look at it and reckon with it as we read. She pushes us to face this child and what she endured before she follows several possible threads of lives that child may have lived.

When I looked back to the “family” portraits of enslaved people and their enslavers in Iran, I was confronted with another side of the story, since narratives of enslavement are already so erased and sanitized in the Iranian context. I can count the number of books written on the history of slavery in Iran during this period—in English and Persian—on my fingers, although the scholarship is growing. The forced invisibility of abolition, the notion that Iran never had slavery or does not have Black people (when, in reality, it had both, both connected and independent of one another, and Black Iranians continue to live there today), has become such a pervasive and powerful national narrative that when photographs of Black Iranians are circulated, they are framed as anthropological discoveries to elicit shock and surprise. While Black Iranians report non-Black Iranians routinely denying their identities and histories, historical photographs circulate on social media as lighthearted jokes without acknowledgment of the enslaved persons that appear within them.[4] References to enslaved people in archives, digital or otherwise, were limited until recently, when most archivists itemized entries by using the obfuscating language of “servant” instead of slave. In these posts, the figure of the enslaved person is almost always untouched, unacknowledged, or, at best, labeled “unknown.” In other posts, these photographs are used to promote a benevolent story of the enslaved as part of the family. The framing of these photographs, then, has been constitutional in the erasure of slavery.

Decisions to blur or overlay images of enslavement in the Americas do not work so well for the Iranian context, because they redouble other kinds of willful absence. I did not want to erase this history or compound its violences; I was trying, precisely, to reveal and redress it. I wanted people who read my book to be able to learn how these photographs were structured, so that they could also recognize what the photograph was showing them. The blur not only distorted the image but also the ability to read it. I could not honor the stories of the people in the photographs this way.

I consulted with other scholars and colleagues. At that time, I served as the Resident Historian for the Collective for Black Iranians; I spoke with the founders and members of the Collective as well. The resounding conclusion was that the photographs were painful to look at but needed to be included in the book to properly honor this history. I decided I would use the photographs in the formats in which I came across them, but that I would tread carefully with them. And so, I opened The Color Black with a “Note on Photography” to contextualize my decision to publish twenty photographs of enslaved people from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the note, I recognized that the photographs were tools of both the forced visibility of enslavement and the forced invisibility of abolition, but I decided to publish them—rather than censoring them, presenting them only as traces, or substituting them with detailed descriptions—to avoid furthering large-scale erasures surrounding race and enslavement throughout Iran.[5] It was important for me that the note be one of the first things the reader encounters when opening the book, to prime them for what they were able to see: photographs of people who should be treated with dignity and respect.

The Color Black was published in 2024 and has over thirty images, among them photographs from Golestan Palace, private family collections, the Smithsonian, and the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI) digital archive, alongside illustrations, portraits, caricatures, and other documents. Two such photographs are from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when wealthy families began to commission these polished “family” portraits (figs. 5 and 6). We can see the expressions of the enslaved men and the children they were charged with looking after, the details of their clothing, even the torn photograph edges. Whereas the blurred and outlined versions emphasize how formulaic these portraits are, how the enslaved men’s bodies frame those of the enslavers’ children (the enslaving children), the reproductions of the originals reveal how photography was used to show others how to see race, particularly Blackness, in sepia or black-and-white photography.

Reading Photographs

In January 2025, Lanier published her own book, From These Roots: My Fight With Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy, which features Renty’s photograph on the cover.[6] A few months later, the court ruled for Harvard to transfer the photographs of Delia and Renty, alongside others, to the International African American Museum. Lanier, who hailed the transfer of the photographs a “homecoming,” has suggested that the transfer will allow for the images to be cared for and appreciated in ways they could not be at Harvard.[7]

Lanier’s welcoming of the case’s resolution suggests that there are ways to house photographs—even those taken in the most depraved of circumstances and enacting the most vicious of ideologies—within the right institutional and scholarly settings. Unlike Harvard, the International African American Museum had not trafficked in nineteenth-century theories of scientific racism. To the contrary, the Museum was established in 2023, at a major port site of enslavement, in an effort towards the reclamation and restitution of these histories. Given that the daguerreotypes were created in situations of non-consent, care in their treatment can only be limited and relational; but some measure of care is still possible and necessary, as Lanier’s act of “rehoming” the images makes clear.

I now see my decision to reproduce photographs of enslaved people in my book as being in line with Lanier’s efforts to secure the transfer of the daguerreotypes from Harvard to the International African American Museum: not withdrawing the photographs from public view, but carefully and respectfully (re)contextualizing them, so as to center the stories of people rather than the systems that oppressed them. Two years after the publication of The Color Black, the inclusion of the images has generated new ways of seeing and reading enslavement. One of the images I reproduce and discuss in the book is a “Group Portrait” by Iran Khanum and Amirdokht Ghaffari (fig. 6). Standing in the back of the image is Abo’l Qasem, whom the archival caption in English describes as “child of one of the house servants.” In Persian, however, he is labeled as a khanehzad, which is best translated as “born of the house [that enslaves them].” Abo’l Qasem’s parents had also been enslaved by this family, and he was born into his enslavement. Now a young man, he escorts the children of his enslavers for a photograph as a visual demonstration that they are well-cared for. The inscription, perhaps written by the children’s parent and Abo’l Qasem’s enslaver, reads, “Dedicating this photograph of the children to you, an invitation to come to Tehran. Abo’l Qasem, ʿAli Naqi Khan, Badiʿ oz-Zaman, Sayf od-Din Khan [the three children]. But Sayf od-Din is much better than his photo, his face looks very black because of a shadow” (Baghoolizadeh, The Color Black, 58).

But what about Abo’l Qasem? Abo’l Qasem is Black, but Abo’l Qasem’s Blackness did not need to be mentioned in this caption. His Blackness was a given—he is standing, he is clearly the children’s chaperone and not a member of the family. Only the dark complexion of the child is noteworthy, and necessary to clarify, so as to identify the child as enslaver and not enslaved. While Abo’l Qasem’s photograph is notable for the accompanying caption that includes his name, it still conveys the racial, spatial, and relational information necessary to define him as an enslaved Black man by negation.

After coming across this photograph in The Color Black, some colleagues have asked me about Sayf od-Din and Abo’l Qasem. Was it possible they were brothers, both born to an enslaved Black woman, one to the enslaver patriarch, and the other to an enslaved man? Or perhaps two different enslaved Black women, but still differentiated by the status of their fathers? These speculations are only possible because my colleagues considered the photograph in its full context of enslavement in Iran during this period. And while I am not convinced these suggestions are correct, they raise important questions, as I am not aware of any portraits that included the children of enslaved women alongside their free or unfree siblings. In any case, I am certain my colleagues would not have shared these thoughts had I blurred the images, and their questions underscore my point: these photographs were wielded to teach racial difference, regardless of the reality. While it is impossible to know the exact details of their relationship from the photograph, it is clear that Sayf od-Din is free, and Abo’l Qasem is enslaved, and that their perceived non-Blackness or Blackness was pertinent to these distinctions.

The decision to share the photographs has had not only intellectual ramifications, opening up the conversation to new possible understandings of the past, but personal ones as well. Since the book’s publication, The Color Black has given some people resources for interpreting photographs passed down in their families. This includes Black Iranians searching for clues of their enslaved ancestors and others looking to address sordid pasts they have inherited. In a case where generations have learned to deny a recent history of enslavement and to obfuscate its violence, looking away from these photographs risks reinforcing denial; but facing the original images can help us to remember the enslaved.