How the camera confronted slavery â and still does By Mark Feeney Globe Staff,Updated December 30, 2020, 2:02 p.m. Email to a Friend Carrie Mae Weems, "While Sitting Upon the Ruins of Your Remains, I Pondered the Course of History" (2016-17), from "To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes" (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2020).Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York The course of history didnât change in 1839, with the invention of photography. What did change was our collective relationship to history. Camera-captured images altered the publicâs understanding of events â or, at the very least, made it harder to ignore them. The novelist Wright Morris, who was also a very good photographer, once asked a deeply provocative question: If there had been someone with a camera when Christ arrived at Golgotha, how would that have changed our understanding of events on that particular hill on that particular day?