This article analyses the ambivalent legacy of Pierre Verger in the Whydah Historical Museum (Benin). Created in the Portuguese fort once used for the Atlantic slave trade and transformed into a museum in 1967, it is dedicated to the history of the region and its cultural consequences. This article examines the distinction between the way Verger used his photographs as a tool for anthropological exploration and the reinterpretation of those pictures by way of an ideological discourse once they were fixed in a museological context.