Stephen Berkman - Woman Hand-Knitting a Condom

This is a photography of a woman hand-knitting a condom. Ok. If you wonder whether it is practical or not - try not to think too hard about it. The dating is presumably late 19th century. People loved to photograph stupid things then.

The photo was made by Stephen Berkman for his book Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years. It is a collection of stylized photographs that tells the story and shows the ouevre of Zohar Studios. The story goes - its founder Shimmel Zohar immigrated to United States in the 1850s and opened his photo studio on Lower East Side. He intended to capture the gist of the time he lived in. The studio was popular among the locals and managed to capture the weirder side of its clients.

It is a simple yet effective premise to showcase some inventive retrophotography while avoiding being mid-2000s hipster pretentious. It is also a good way to smoothly immerse the viewer into the world. Having a narrative behind a collection of images is much more engaging than just dumping a bunch of oddball images with no context.

The book is a great example of hauntology done right. From the aesthetic standpoint, you have a combination of early photography quirks (after all, one of the most prominent photos of the early years was an autoportrait as a drown man) with 20th century subversive explorations of psyche as seen in the works of Joel-Peter Witkin with an oddity grounded by the way of Diane Arbus. 

Things get weird, but not weird as a statement or weird for the sake of weird - the scenarios fit the narrative "oh yeah, this thing would be fun". And it is a tough balancing act because of temptation of going overboard. 

The other great photo from the book is classic bodypart substitution called "Obscura Object" in the head of a woman in a strict dress is replaced with a train whistle. While it is closer to things Man Ray was doing in 1910s-1920s