The photos belonged to the photographer, not the subjects, the judge ruled. March 5, 2021 Attorney Benjamin Crump, left, speaks during a press conference announcing the lawsuit against Harvard University. Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images. Harvard University does not have to hand over a set of 19th-century daguerreotypes, thought to be among the first photographs of enslaved people in America, to one of the subject’s ancestors, a Massachusetts judge has ruled. In dismissing the case, the judge has ended one chapter of the lawsuit, which began in March 2019 when a retired probation officer in Connecticut named Tamara Lanier filed a lawsuit alleged that the Ivy League university illegally owned the photos and was responsible for a “decades-long campaign to sanitize the history of the images and exploit them for prestige and profit.”