You Became a Scientific Profile

Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection
Section: Appropriation
In her series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems brackets well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century photographic representations of African Americans in the United States with two portraits of an African woman who laments what has happened to the African diasporic community. Weems’s text, which is etched on glass, creates distance from the original photographs while calling out their racist intent.
For these works, Weems used daguerreotypes of enslaved people in Columbia, South Carolina, taken in 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy. Made at the behest of Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, who had emigrated to the United States and became the country’s most famous scientist, these images were intended to show the physical differences between African blacks and European whites. Agassiz and other scientists believed that the races evolved separately and that the white race was superior, thus supporting Southern views of slavery.