It only gets more and more difficult to imagine that ephemeral historical moment in which cameras and photos were not ubiquitous, but rather, the stuff of a few privileged technical artisans. Stephen Berkman, however, the Syracuse-born artist behind a captivating new photography installation at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, not only invites us to consider that moment, but draws it forth from its murky past and blends it into the present. This blending, though, is not what you might think. There is a deliberate mysteriousness to the context and origins of the photos in Berkman’s Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years, a mystery suggested by the paradoxical title of the exhibition (and eponymous book), and which the viewer realizes is a mystery only in the trajectory of his movement through the images.

The photos are rendered from the long-exposure collodion process of the mid-nineteenth century. One photo blurrily depicts in sepia tones an elderly Hasidic man (a mohel, in fact) hunched over a cane, sitting beside his set of instruments. Another portrays a woman seated formally in a lacquered wooden chair, knitting. Yet another shows an ornately dressed Black man gripping a brass horn and stirring into the motion of dance. And the faithfulness to the aesthetic of that Victorian-era serves to disarm the viewer, at least initially, of any potential skepticism about the sheer strangeness of the content.

It is only after considering things a bit more closely that one notices that the caption below the picture of the mohel reveals that he is blind; that the textile object the formal woman is knitting is a condom (and is she smirking?); and that slavery in America was (ostensibly) formally abolished in 1865, a mere fifteen years after the development of the collodion photographic process, rendering the likelihood of finding a Black man in this context astronomically slim, if not impossible. And from there, the images only get stranger, moving into the territory of the comic, the bizarre, and sometimes the downright creepy.

Zohar Studios, the locale of these scenes, is the creative space of Shimmel Zohar, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who set up shop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His studio, however, is not a historical relic of the mid-nineteenth century, but a mythological invention of Berkman himself—and Shimmel Zohar, an amalgam of Jewish identity and nineteenth century photographic yearning. By assuming the lens (literally) of Zohar, and working with the photographic process that would have been Zohar’s, Berkman affects a synthesis of Zohar’s identity with his own—the same activity that the fiction writer performs when she inscribes a narrative from the first-person perspective. And what a bold act it is for one to uninvitedly assume responsibility for the perspective and narrative of another, whose story has already elapsed.

Bold (and potentially problematic) though it may be, such an act is inherently indivisible from empathy. The first part of Berkman’s photo-book consists of fifty-five plates presented devoid of any context other than their captions. It is only in the second section that Berkman supplies rich histories and contexts for the individual images that appear in the first. This separation allows, or perhaps forces, the viewer to behold the photographs, first, in the vacuum of their visual purity—an experience that is liable to be as bewitching as it is frustrating, due to the myriad questions each photo per se raises. The critical contexts furnished in the following section, however, betray Berkman’s desire for us to develop a greater understanding of these narratives, rather than remain baffled by them. And as a result, one finds oneself bending the pages back from the contextual passages to the photos over and over again, a basic physical act whose very process mirrors the way in which Berkman, in his art, has bent the linearity of time back against itself.

Thus, by virtue of his narrative and formal approach, Berkman’s whacky and arresting project is a manifestation of a high form of empathic seeking. He has displaced his own ego in favor of Zohar’s. He has rendered images that demand attention and patience, both from the photographer and from the viewer. He’s refreshingly unafraid of humor. And for all its bizarreness, he’s presented a collection that shows us something undeniably human. Perhaps, then, the great irony of fiction is that it’s true.