“Zohar Studios: The Lost Years” by Stephen Berkman @ Hyperallergic

The perception of photography as a documental form is based on a simple premise: you cannot photograph something that isn’t there. In his latest project, photographer Stephen Berkman turns this idea on its head by claiming to document what is no longer there … and maybe what never was. On this point, you won’t get a straight answer out of Berkman.

“Creating the book, I never thought about it in terms of classification,” he said, in a phone interview with Hyperallergic. “I hope this book looks to the future as it exhumes the past.”

Berkman conveys a deep understanding — and even fetishization — of the mechanics of analog and chemical photography, but has still managed to capture a speculative bit of history with Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years, a book just published by the Los Angeles-based Hat & Beard Press. The expansive collection of images presents the colorful cast of characters in attendance at the mythical Zohar Studios, a 19th-century Lower East Side photographic establishment of the eponymous Shimmel Zohar — an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in the 1850s (according to detailed archival materials included in the book’s back matter).

Read more here…

Step into an Imaginary Photography Studio From the 1850s

Image: “Zohar’s Voyage” from Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years published by Hat & Beard Press (courtesy Stephen Berkman)