A supposedly historical photograph has circulated on social networks, showing a seller of very peculiar products. We have verified the authenticity of this photo.

At the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, a photo of a man showing off a set of wool triangular items began to go viral on the Internet. The picture was accompanied by captions like “Seller of intimate wigs. New York, 1860s." Similar publications can be found in enough popular publics on VKontakte, on Facebook, V Twitter, "Odnoklassniki", LiveJournal and on other platforms. On October 30, a note dedicated to this photo, published Maxim magazine. The image has also become popular abroad, for example on Reddit.

If you search for this photo on Google, most of the links that appear in the results are pages on social networks and blogging platforms. The article by Lawrence Weschler clearly stands out from this series, published in September 2020 in The Atlantic magazine. This text is called "The Incredible Story of Schimmel Zohar" and, as indicated at the end of the material, is a paraphrase of Weschler's afterword to the catalog exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

According to Weschler, he first heard about Schimmel Tzohar from a museum employee, Gravity Goldberg, when the institution was preparing to display a “recently discovered treasure trove of work” by a photographer who emigrated from the Baltic states in the 19th century and captured the life of New York of his time. Although the catalog was almost ready for publication, Goldberg saw some kind of catch in this whole story and invited Weschler to look into it. He agreed, read the draft catalog and also found many oddities in the photographs. The photographs showed, in particular, a man with a bump on his forehead holding a banana peel in his hand, a girl knitting a condom, and Siamese twins joined only by their mustaches. “Seller of intimate wigs” was also included in the selection. The pictures, funny in themselves, were accompanied by equally funny captions.

Weschler met with Stephen Berkman, the man who provided the museum with “a collection of Tzohar’s work.” Berkman said he teaches at the Pasadena College of Art and has long been interested in ancient photography techniques. He even set up a darkroom at his home, where he took an “antique” photograph of Weschler on a glass plate, while at the same time talking in detail about the technology he used. However, when the guest started talking about the New York photographer of the 19th century, Berkman avoided answering.

The next day, Weschler and Berkman met again. The photographer said that in the late 1990s, during a trip to New York, he discovered an old scrapbook at a flea market - from there he learned about the existence of Tsohar’s photography studio. On his subsequent visits, Berkman learned several facts about the man and his workshop. They even allegedly found a box signed with his name - however, there were no plates with photographs in it, there was only a notebook with notes in Yiddish. An acquaintance of Berkman began working on the translation, although their mutual friends doubted its correctness. Soon this acquaintance who allegedly knew Yiddish died, and the notebook was lost.

Not finding any surviving works by Tsohar, Berkman wanted to pay tribute to the photographer who lived in the nineteenth century. He decided to recreate the pictures based on descriptions made by his friend. For almost 20 years, Berkman and his wife searched for models, prepared costumes and props, assembled sets and set up a photo studio in the backyard of their own home. The photographs were made using technology that Tsohar and his contemporaries probably used. “So yes, technically the photos were taken by me,” Berkman said in an interview. Back in 2014 he presented intermediate results of their work in public.

A few days after the publication in The Atlantic, the Contemporary Jewish Museum spent online public meeting with Weschler and Berkman. The latter admitted during the conversation that at least some of the scenes captured in the photographs were his own invention and they have nothing to do with Tsohar’s recordings, even if we believe in their existence and/or the correctness of the translation made by Berkman’s friend.

Thus, the photograph that has become viral is a modern photograph created using technology from the mid-19th century. How reliable is the story of its author Stephen Berkman about the background of the project, including the very existence of Shimmel Tsohar, is a controversial issue, and the authors of publications about this series and the subsequent exhibition answer at him differently. Be that as it may, the man depicted in the picture is our contemporary, and not at all a “seller of intimate goods” from New York in the 1860s.