Predicting the Past follows the nineteenth-century story of Shimmel Zohar, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who reached America in the 1850s and, after making his name as a silhouette artist, ran Zohar Studios, a photographic establishment on Pearl Street in the Lower East Side of New York. Stephen Berkman revives that vanished world as a tribute to the studio, working with the glass plate process and period lenses still coated with the dust of the nineteenth century. Each tableau is staged like a frame from a forgotten nitrate film and peopled by phrenologists, ventriloquists, painters, poets, spiritualists, merchants, luddites and bon vivants. History is mixed with necessary fictions, in a book that is oblique but never opaque and extensively annotated. Nearly 200 images, original photographs and ephemera, are reproduced in four-color and tritone, and an afterword by Lawrence Weschler retraces the story behind the story and places the book in the pantheon of photography. The cover shows a woman in a dress covered with oval portraits, wearing roller skates, beside a Zohar Studios banner in front of a painted backdrop with a monkey operating a camera on a pedestal. The pages shown on the publisher's site include two seated men in dark suits joined by a band across their faces, two white plaster heads linked by a strap, a seated woman holding yarn, a headless figure in a long dark dress before a painted lake, and a small flag planted on a barren rocky plain.