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. The process became popular within a few years after its invention, 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.

In the following text, András Váradi, the curator of the exhibition, paraphrases a conversation from a rare meeting with Stephen Berkman late last summer.

I am usually not nervous before the plane takes off. But this one doesn’t want to take off at all. Every ten minutes or so the pilot tells us we might be soon on our way—and then we stay put. I’m flying from San Francisco to Pasadena to meet Stephen Berkman in person after the multitude of emails we exchanged. My head is full of questions—and the thing that’s bugging me the most right now is whether I’ll have time to do everything I’ve planned to do, since I’ll only be there for a short day and we have wasted an hour in the stationary plane. Meanwhile, I text Stephen not to go to the airport just yet—and then the plane starts taxiing towards the runway. It’s a short flight, maybe 50 minutes, and I have no luggage, so I’m on my way out soon. Stephen is waiting outside the exit on the right, as agreed. I recognize him, but I am also surprised: his characteristic sideburns, which the English call ‘Dundreary whiskers,’ are even longer and bushier than in the photos on the internet. It occurs to me that this facial hair cannot be a coincidence, since Zohar was almost obsessed with hair, its bizarre manifestations on humans. Just remember to ask!

We take turns in lambasting the airline as we walk to his car. It’s a big Chevy pickup truck, quite macho—quite at odds with my idea of him—but then, what do I know about Americans and their taste in cars? I suppose he also hauls large pieces of equipment, because in addition to being a photographer and a historian of photography, he is also a film-maker. All this while, we zip by the largest film studios in the world—this is Columbia here, Warner Brothers there, Metro Goldwyn Mayer must be here somewhere. We finally arrive at Stephen’s house, and head straight for the sunlight studio in the garden.

‘This used to be a studio, used by a sculptor, but I converted it into a sunlight studio,’ a smiling Stephen starts introducing the place. ‘The glass panels on top are slanted, and the whole wall overlooking the garden is also made of glass. And when it rains, the skylight leaks, just like they did back in the old day. That’s what 19th-century photographic studios were like.’

‘You’ll see one in Budapest at Mai Manó House, where the exhibition will be, but it occupies an upper floor in a building in the centre of the city. No dripping water, fortunately.’

‘I’m very curious, I think you couldn’t imagine a better place for the Zohar exhibition. I’m thrilled that this collection of 19th-century photographs will be on display in such an authentic place.’

‘Stephen, who should we talk about first, you or the creator of the cultural treasure you discovered, the Lithuanian immigrant Shimmel Zohar, who landed in New York in 1857?’

‘Let Zohar come first,’ says Stephen. ‘You must already be familiar with the story, because I relayed it in an extended interview with Lawrence Weschler entitled The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar. Instead of attempting to summarize it in a few words, it is better if those who are interested read the full interview published here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/uncanny-tale-shimmel-zohar/616060/

‘Zohar himself can be best acknowledged through the photographs’ continued Stephen and added an important note to it ‘I felt in the depths of my soul that I had to do something to prevent Zohar from disappearing into oblivion again.”

‘So now let’s talk about Stephen Berkman, about you. With the understanding, of course, that you’ll have to share the story of the last twenty-plus years of your life with that of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Zohar, with whom you became conjoined twins. There is in fact a very interesting photo in this collection, which is titled exactly that: Conjoined Twins. There are other reasons as well why I would like to return to this photo later, but now please tell me, why you fell in love with photography—as a child, I assume—and why the wet collodion, of all the processes?’

‘I come from a Jewish family that immigrated from Lithuania, I remember my grandparents spoke Yiddish too, they fled the pogroms in the early 20th century. I had a happy childhood, my mother wrote short stories, which I was very proud of. My growing passion for photography coincided with a resurgence of my interest in Judaism and Jewishness in general, but this should be understood in cultural rather than religious terms. I was particularly preoccupied with the shtetl culture of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.’ (The two relevant Zohar photos at the show are A Wandering Jewess and Entertainment in the Shtetl. Ed.)

‘When I was fifteen, I thought of becoming a photojournalist and my pictures appeared in local newspapers. But even then I remember becoming more and more interested in 19th century photography and wondering if it was possible to use old lenses, cameras and the complicated chemistry of 19th century photography to produce images of the same beauty as the great old masters. When I got to university in San Francisco, I didn’t choose Judaism studies or the history of photography, but studied film, and then transferred to De Anza College (Cuperino, California), also for film studies.’

‘Now I understand why you said somewhere that most Zohar photos look like single frames taken from a film. As if they were made from a pre-written script.’

‘That is correct, but to continue, I was fascinated by the wet collodion technique. And it fulfilled my obsession with this technique to be able to realize my ideas. Look around, what you see here is all about that.’

‘What do you teach at the film programme of the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena)?’

Stephen doesn’t answer immediately, and then asks back: ‘Are you familiar with the film Wind?’

I’m embarrassed, get exam nerves. But then it occurs to me, would this be the short film by Marcel Iványi?

‘Are you referring to the single-shot film that lasts 6 or 8 minutes, with the camera slowly describing a full circle?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. For example, I show this to my students every year. And I also tell them about Jancsó, who I consider one of the greatest film-makers. We also do an analysis of Son of Saul.’

He stands up excitedly, placing his hand somewhere behind his head with an open palm, indicating the distinctive camera position in the film. ‘That cameraman is a genius,’ he says.

Since Stephen is not familiar with the short, Patience, which Jeles-Nemes and Erdély made a few years before Saul, I send it to him when I get home.

He responds immediately: ‘This too is brilliant. I’ll be teaching it next week.’

‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. It’s a bit personal, because it’s about your iconic sideburns. Once you were asked how long you’d been growing them, to which you said since you were three, which I found very amusing. Then I understood that you meant you had never cut it off. I somehow got the idea that your Victorian facial hair had something to do with the many Zohar photos that revolve around the fetish of hair and body hair. Four of them will be on view at the Budapest exhibition, including the aforementioned Conjoined Twins, who are bound at their moustaches. And then there’s the young woman who did not use the hair restorer as intended, and applied it to her groin, growing a wild cataract of hair that falls on the ground. This image is displayed in a small daguerreotype case in the hands of a lovelorn man (picture in the picture). And let’s not forget the travelling salesman peddling intimate wigs. I associate these symbolically with your sideburns. But more importantly, the question that is nagging at me is whether you have ever heard of Anna Csillag?’

‘Not that I recall. Why, what is there to know about her?’

‘In East Central Europe, when we talk about luscious hair, we think of Anna Csillag and her miraculous hair restorer. Launched in 1884, it was one of the first modern, international advertising campaigns, and the product did conquer half of Europe and remained on the market for decades.’

I open my laptop and type ‘Csillag Anna’ in the search engine. Stephen is fascinated by the woodcuts in the advertising pages of 19th-century newspapers; I, Anna Csillag, with my 185 cm-long Loreley hair... This is how every advertisement starts, whether in Hungarian, German, Polish, Czech or Russin. We also find a blog, luckily in English, with more pictures and quotes from literature. The first reads: ‘“I, Anna Csillag, born in Karlovice in Moravia, had a meagre growth of hair...” It was a long story, similar in construction to the story of Job...’

‘Who wrote it?’ Stephen asks and leans closer to the screen, and then gasps in astonishment. ‘It’s Bruno Schulz, my favourite author,’ he says, moved, and hurries to the bookshelf. ‘I have all his short stories—in fact, I have both English translations right here next to each other. But I thought she was a fictional character. It’s interesting, sometimes a real person becomes fiction, sometimes the other way round.’ A fairly reserved character rarely given to enthusing, Stephen is now positively fired up. ‘How glad I am that we found your Anna!’

Then and there we decide to bring together Zohar’s hair fetish photos with the Anna Csillag phenomenon at the exhibition.

Zohar’s photographs were published in a large album to coincide with the San Francisco exhibition. The 30×37 centimetre, three-and-a-half-kilo book contains fabulous, full-page, sepia-brown prints on art paper. But the pictures occupy only a third of the album’s 360 pages, the rest being largely devoted to texts related to the images—and they give you pause for thought because their genre is hard to define: are they mini-essays, lengthy notes on cultural history, or sophisticated jokes underpinned by documents? It is probably safest to say the annotations are as enigmatic as the photographs that inspired them.

‘Stephen, it seems to me that your motto, ‘Complement history with as much fiction as necessary,’ comes to its own in these short, brilliant texts. Of all the things I’ve read in my life in which the serious turns into absurdly funny, few were more entertaining. It is a pity that they cannot be shown in an exhibition. I have found one that mentions the greatest Hungarian historical hero, and a short quote from it would be nice to display in Mai Manó House, if you agree.’

‘You mean the Zohar photograph of Fraternal Furriers?’

‘That’s the one. You write there that ‘the wearing of beaver fur—especially the tall top hat made from it—symbolized higher social status in America. The demand for beaver pelts was so great that there was a danger that the animal would disappear from North America, becoming extinct. The fact that this did not happen, according to many experts, is due to Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth arrived in New York in 1851 after the failed Hungarian War of Independence, where he was hailed as a hero of national independence. Kossuth was wearing a short slouch hat made of fabric which became so popular that he even changed American hat fashion. Anyone with a social conscience, who wanted to be seen as a believer in progressive ideas, began to wear a Kossuth hat of baize. The beavers were saved.’

‘I am fascinated by your book, which seamlessly places the photography in the context of historical events; especially when the internal narrative of each photograph intersects with pivotal moments in time. I think whoever immerses themselves in your book—the photos and the texts—will discover new perspectives on the past and the present, and perhaps even on the future. Which is what makes the title so apt: Predicting the Past.’