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Predicting the Past - The Mysteries of the Zohar Studios

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I am looking at the photographs by Shimmel Zohar, now I feel as though I've been led into a labyrinth with no apparent exit. Photographs hang on the walls, but what I see are not traditional photographs; rather, they are peculiar scenes that could have been created with some other technique. Photographs executed with perfect precision. However, what the photographer creates should not be confined to the art of photography. He is an artist who, in this case, has created magically powerful works within the genre of photography. Perhaps this is the reason why I have a constant feeling as if I am being manipulated into an unknown direction. His images draw me in, and I find myself not just looking at the pictures but immersed in the midst of bizarre stories.

Let me recount one. Cleopatra sometime in the mythical past, shaved off her pubic hair and had a wig made from it for her balding but still potent lover, Marcus Antonius. Through him, the wig made its way to Rome, where it was later worn by numerous Roman emperors during licentious parties. In 328, Emperor Constantine the Great ceremoniously presented the wig to the Pope, making it the property of the papacy for centuries. However, in the 17th century, Pope Clement X passed it on to King Charles XI, who refurbished the now-worn wig with his lover's pubic hair. Charles later gifted the wig to the Earl of Moray, who, in turn, handed it over to a Scottish club within which the celebration of sexuality was their primary goal. Some members of the club stole the wig in 1775 and established another club named "The Wig Club". The wig was last seen in this club. I'm sure it still exists somewhere today. It would be worth tracking down.

Is all this true? Possibly, yes or no. But even if not, it is such a beautiful story that it could even be valid. As Heinrich von Kleist's protagonist, Michael Kohlhaas, said, "Reality does not always coincide with probability." But there’s a hitch. Creating a wig requires a lot of hair, certainly more than what can be obtained from a woman's pubic hair. If Cleopatra could still manage to grow this big, then indeed her secret hair must have been one of nature's wonders. However, perhaps she wasn't the only one in possession of such a marvel. Looking at the exhibited photograph titled Lazy Susan, there were women who could also imitate her. A mysterious professor – I will return to him later – wrote an extensive commentary on this photo, and there I read this story. Moreover, according to one of the displayed images, one can grow also a mustache so large that it can capture another mustache as a captive. And also a sideburn can grow uniquely long if left untrimmed. Like that of our guest Stephen Berkman, which – at least as told to curator András Váradi – he has been growing since the age of three. (Thanks cannot be expressed enough to András Váradi for organizing this exhibition – he was the one who first shared the news about Berkman and Zohar years ago, and he tirelessly worked to bring this exhibition to the Mai Manó Studio, an ideal venue for these images.) Returning to the wig: in our world, there are many things lurking that make everything a bit unstable, unreliable. The longer I observe, for example, the photograph entitled The Baroness of the Babylon Boulvard and her face reminiscent of Mona Lisa, the less I can decide if I see a woman or a man. Most likely, it's a mixture of both. I see the transition, the movement: from here to there, from there to here. It's as if we've been pushed onto ice without knowing how to skate.

I'm looking at the largescale photographs – who created them? Shimmel Zohar, the long-forgotten 19th-century photographer? Or Stephen Berkman, who unearthed Zohar from the shadows of oblivion and made his long-lost images visible to us using the wet collodion process? According to Berkman, Shimmel Zohar was born in 1822 in Lithuania, then arrived in New York in 1857, eventually opening a photography studio in the bustling Lower East Side, specifically at 432 Pearl Street. At that time, there were already more than a hundred photography studios operating in New York, with the majority producing daguerreotypes. However, Zohar worked with the wet collodion process, which eventually pushed daguerreotypes out of the market. How does one create a photograph using this method? There's no room to explain this here; there's an instructional video on the website of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, coincidentally created by Stephen Berkman, demonstrating the creation of the photograph titled Second Thought, which is also on display at the exhibition. In the 1990s, Berkman and his wife stumbled upon an old album at the Chelsea Flea Market in New York, from which a piece of paper fell out. This note referred to the Zohar Studio operating on Pearl Street in New York, as Berkman recounts to writer Lawrence Weschler, who dedicated an entire book to Berkman's work. Then, during another visit to New York – another coincidence – Berkman purchased a small trunk from an antique dealer, and within it – more coincidences – was a secret compartment containing a Yiddish-language notebook kept by Zohar himself. In it, Zohar described the images he captured, the techniques he used, how he arranged settings, and so on. Now, Berkman faced the task of creating the photographs based on these descriptions, images that existed and yet did not exist. Something similar had happened before. In the 3rd century, the Greek writer Philostratus compiled a book called Images, describing Neapolitan paintings that were later destroyed. In the 16th century, Titian attempted to paint what Philostratus had described. Berkman is a master of this reverse ekphrasis. However, just as Philostratus couldn't verify whether the paintings he described were indeed as Titian painted them, Berkman cannot prove his own truth because – another coincidence – the notebook attributed to Zohar is lost. Not only the original images but also their descriptions are unavailable to us. So, we must trust Berkman, who brought the former photographs to life.

The result: photographs created using the wet collodion process that transport the 21st century viewer back to the 19th century, into the world of Melville, Whitman, and Mark Twain, as well as into the world of 19th-century Galician Jewry. Moreover, to make everything complete, he contacted a professor to provide detailed commentary for each photograph. In one of these commentaries, I read about Cleopatra's wig. And if, after the many cultural-historical digressions, I look at the photograph titled Lazy Susan again, I don't just see a 19th-century woman with a suspiciously 21st-century face, but also realize that a single image can trigger a cultural-historical avalanche that can bury me as a viewer. Data piled upon data, labyrinthical stories with numerous branches, one leading into another. The result: a monumental album accompanying the exhibition, which, for me, is inseparable from the images. I have flipped through many art albums in my life, and the Berkman-Zohar album stands out as one of the most unique in terms of book design as well. It's as if we were holding the Talmud in our hands, updated for the 19th century. Or the Zohar (whose complete Hungarian translation was published exactly ten years ago, thanks to Uri Asaf). The author of the commentaries is called Professor M. de Leon, who knows the 19th century with the thoroughness of stamp collectors. It is probably another work of chance, that the Castilian rabbi and Kabbalist, who originally published the Zohar in the 13th century or according to some, he himself wrote it, was called Moses de Leon.

Shimmel Zohar and Stephen Berkman, Professor M. de Leon and Moses de Leon, reality and fiction, truth and deception. We see a world immersed in sepia tones that seems temporally distant but is still ours. In some photos, Georges Méliès also comes to my mind: as if we were entering his absurd, impudent, yet profoundly human world. Berkman didn't simply reconstruct old photographs that no one had seen, but through fiction, he also created a reality. We glance from the 21st century into the 19th century, when it couldn't be foreseen what the interim 20th century would bring to the Central European Jewish culture depicted in the photographs. The future cannot be predicted from the past. However, from the future, a past can be reconstructed. More precisely, a past that offers refuge to those who will live in the future, that is, in the present.

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László F. Földényi

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