Mysterious, sometimes grotesque scenes, a memoir with a female nude, Siamese twins, a girl on roller skates – all from the mid-19th century, with the stunning beauty of a brief, now vanished era of the wet collodion process. Open to modernity and bizarre, imaginative solutions, yet well-versed in the trappings of Victorian America, Shimmel Zohar’s images come to Budapest from 19th century New York.
Who was this forgotten photographer and how did his legacy come to be? This extraordinary cultural treasure was discovered by Stephen Berkman. An obsessive 19th-century photographer, Berkman was an active researcher into the technique of long exposure wet colloidal photography, a technique developed by the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. This technique became popular within a few years because it allowed the production of detailed, finely toned paper images from negatives.
More than 20 years ago, Berkman found a note in an old photo album in a Chelsea junk shop in New York with the inscription Zohar Studio on it. After some archival research, it turned out that the Zohar Studios Photographs had been operating at 432 Pearl Street on the Lower East Side, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, since 1860. According to immigration records, Shimmel Zohar was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island in 1857 at the age of 29.
The pictures, which are not just portraits but often unusual, stunning life portraits, were taken in a studio very similar to the one still preserved in the Mai Manó House.