Book of the Week: Selected by Kim Beil

Book Review Predicting the Past Photographs by Stephen Berkman Reviewed by Kim Beil "Many histories of photography are wishful, if not purely speculative. In the absence of meta-data or contact sheets, how much can we really know about the moment that a picture was taken? Even with these pieces of evidence, how can we know by whom it was taken? Attribution was a notorious problem for collectors who took stamps like ‘Studio of Brady’ at face value..."

Predicting the Past. By Stephen Berkman.

Predicting the Past
Zohar Studios, The Lost Years
Photographs by Stephen Berkman

Hat & Beard Press, 2020. 368 pp., 11x14".

Many histories of photography are wishful, if not purely speculative. In the absence of meta-data or contact sheets, how much can we really know about the moment that a picture was taken? Even with these pieces of evidence, how can we know by whom it was taken? Attribution was a notorious problem for collectors who took stamps like ‘Studio of Brady’ at face value.

Stephen Berkman’s book, Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years, is every bit as paradoxical as its title. The entire project is framed with a classic storytelling device: the assertion that the Zohar project is “based on a true story.” Berkman’s beguiling project both insists on its authenticity and challenges it at every turn.

Berkman’s story, as it unfurls in Lawrence Weschler’s essay, is this: Berkman found an interleaf in a nineteenth-century album that carried the verso impression of a steel engraving. The engraving seemed to depict a New York photo studio called “Zohar’s.” Berkman sought out the original engraving, then immigration records and finally discovered a few other primary source materials. Then, because no images made by Zohar are extant, Berkman re-made them himself. Using a large-format camera and deliriously imperfect lenses, the Los Angeles-based photographer created fantastical scenes with actors, myriad props, and copious historical liberties. The resulting prints made from his wet collodion negatives bear all the marks of archival imagery, from the scratches, rubs, and breaks in the image surface to the hollow cheeks and deep, dark eyes of his sitters.

The pleasure in this book, like some of the pleasures of a daguerreotype, is in the way the details reflect your own image back at you. As a historian of photography, I was immediately taken in by the book’s promise of an undiscovered archive. When I looked closer, I was initially disappointed, then frustrated at being duped. My emotions spun between skepticism, credulity, back to distrust and cynicism, before they finally sublimated into a grinning and giddy appreciation, by way of that other classic story-listening device: suspension of disbelief. I struggled mightily before I was subdued. I was won over by Berkman’s wholesale commitment to his project, which is exactly the kind of passion demanded by the work of history, even if it’s patently fiction.

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Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.