One of the great photographic sensations of recent years was the exhibition of the estate of a formerly unknown mid-19th century New York photographer, Shimmel Zohar, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

Who was this forgotten photographer and how did the estate come to light? This cultural treasure was discovered by Stephen Berkman, who spent more than twenty years writing it up. Fascinated by 19th century photography, Berkman is an expert of the long exposure wet collodion process, which was developed by the English Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. It took only a few years for the process to become popular because it enabled the creation of richly detailed, fine-toned prints from the negative. It was also the process used in the Zohar Studios in the early 1860s.

The shots, which, along with the portraits, include unusual tableaux, were taken in a sunlight studio not unlike the one preserved in Mai Manó House.

With a knowledge of the above, let us take a look at the pictures. The first is the emblem of Zohar Studios, with a young girl in the centre, wearing a full-length dress that is decorated with palm-sized photographs in round frames. The curious phenomenon sports roller skates on her feet. That’s right, roller skates were already a thing in the 1860s. This, then, is the essence of the studio—the accomplishments of an artist and artisan, a certain Shimmel Zohar, who was open-minded towards modernity and bizarre, imaginative solutions, while being well versed in the formalities of Victorian America.

The title of Baronnes of the Babylon Boulevard obviously refers to the tens of thousands of immigrants who arrived in New York during these years, causing a Babelian chaos. If you look long and hard at the face, you are left wondering: is it a young woman or a handsome man looking back at you? Yet another Mona Lisa mystery.  Why are there four of the Three Wise Men? The picture is entitled Three Wise Men and the Fool, and which one of the four is the fool is a mystery.

Mysteries abound.

One of Zohar’s highly meaningful photographs is called Humboldt’s Parrot. On 5 June 1799, German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt set out on an expedition to America. Legend has it that he encountered a native Carib tribe that kept pet parrots in wicker cages, many of which had been taught to speak. Humboldt noticed that one bird’s voice was strikingly different from the others. When he asked the locals what language that parrot spoke, they told him that the bird had belonged to a neighbouring hostile tribe, many of whom they had killed, chasing the others away. The last members of that tribe had died in complete isolation a few years earlier—taking their entire culture, including their language, with them. Humboldt immediately realized that this creature was the only living depository of that language, and phonetically recorded the bird’s entire vocabulary. He resurrected, as it were, a fragment of a language that seemed to have disappeared for good.

Stephen Berkman’s undertaking is similar to what Humboldt did with the parrot: he has brought back to us the stunning beauty of the wet collodion process, whose brief era has long been gone.