This essay is not merely the history of one remarkable lens, but also the story of the man behind it, who helped bring together the once rather quarrelsome worlds of painting and photography. Step this way—or rather, backwards—into ancient Jerusalem and a past steeped in an eclectic mixture of brass, petroleum and orchids.
Exposition
Welcome to the Long 19th Century, when the breakneck pace of progress spared neither photographic optics nor much else besides. From my earlier article we already know that photography did not take long to shed its most troublesome technical limitations and approach something close to perfection. Then, quite suddenly, came the twist: a substantial number of photographers rejected this supposedly dull flawlessness and stubbornly set off in another direction, apparently marching backwards. Yet it was not really a retreat from progress, merely a different, unexplored road forward.
John Simeon Bergheim was born in Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and before turning thirty had already managed to become a British citizen, civil engineer, mining engineer, treasurer of the London Wagner Society and member of the committee appointed by the London Dialectical Society to investigate spiritualist phenomena. The Renaissance may have ended, but Renaissance men apparently had not.
A little later he also began to drill, baby, drill. He travelled to Petrolia, in search of experienced drillers of black gold, and later put the local know-how to use in places such as Romania, southern Russia, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria and, above all, what was then Austrian Galicia. To his growing collection of professions and hobbies he could therefore add drilling technologist, oil-and-iron magnate and globetrotter. His wonderfully broad range of activities and constant wandering around the map allowed him to move through some of the great centres in which the arts of the period were changing at a frantic pace. And so, after drilling into half the world, he eventually began drilling into photography as well. He can hardly have suspected that this final pursuit would leave such an indelible mark on history.
Collision
We know little about the motives behind Bergheim's first artistic steps. Yet from scattered scraps of paper and the odd fleck of dried paint, one can at least suspect that his right hemisphere was becoming increasingly noisy. Historical sources routinely describe him as a painter, although I have been unable to find a single surviving work of his. His photographs have fared somewhat better, but the important point is that he approached photography in a distinctly painterly manner.
The Rijksmuseum records early portraits and studies of women dating from around 1889, already stylised and conspicuously unlike photographs for an identity card. Three years later, as the century of steam was approaching its end, he shovelled more coal into the furnace and won a silver medal from the Vienna Photographic Society for portrait studies made with a pinhole camera and simple lenses—quite obviously with artistic rather than technical intent. Heinrich Kühn later recalled that Bergheim found residual chromatic aberration visually pleasing, while contemporary critics compared the conception and softness of his photographs to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron. Right. He's hooked!
His technocratic left hemisphere appears to take a holiday while the rest of him works like a Styrian cart horse.
- 1892—he becomes an early member of The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, founded partly in reaction against the photographic establishment and the tendency of the Royal Photographic Society to judge photography primarily by technical standards. He acquires the nickname Smudger. So at that time, both Jack the Ripper and John the Smearer were on the loose in London.
- 1894—he publishes the photogravure Ghazaleh, along with works such as Studienkopf and Cinderella, a triptych of portraits of the same woman.
- 1895—he follows with works including Cordelia, Coquette and Sylvia.
- 1896—more works follow, among them Kummer and Porträt. In Kummer, he studies the expression of a person so deeply consumed by grief that the face has become almost motionless.
His style is beginning to acquire firm (soft?!) outlines, but he is also running into creative restraints. He wants a lens that is soft, but not simply out of focus. Poorly corrected, yet controllable. Painterly, yet still photographic. In other words, he needs a precisely manufactured imperfection. What he is looking for simply does not exist.
Crisis
Bergheim begins studying the causes of soft focus and turns himself into an amateur optician, intent on suppressing unnecessary detail. He discusses the aesthetics of photography with several painter friends, yet the appearance he wants continues to elude him.
From Telephotography we learn that he had already begun experimenting with lens construction in 1893. He first played with spectacle lenses and various magnifiers, then progressed to the principle of a telephoto system: an uncorrected positive singlet at the front combined with an uncorrected negative singlet behind it. The two simple elements deliberately retain both spherical and chromatic aberration, the latter of which Bergheim believed produced the proper soft-focus image and was essential to the result he sought. His experiments take him a long way, but not far enough. So he brings his vision to a battle-hardened veteran of optical design, and onto the stage steps Bond. James Bond Dallmeyer. Thomas Rudolphus Dallmeyer.
Peripeteia
Bergheim does not arrive at Dallmeyer's door like some penniless bride. He already knows what sort of image he wants, has experience with various imperfect optical systems, understands the aesthetic effects of their aberrations, and makes the results of his experiments available for further development. Dallmeyer, meanwhile, pulls from his sleeve the accumulated experience of an established optical designer and has exactly what is needed to turn Bergheim's experiments into a finished, commercially manufacturable lens.
And so, anno 1896, a serially produced result of genuine collaboration sees the light of day, the first lens in history designed specifically for soft-focus photography. The Dallmeyer-Bergheim.
- The lens actually appears in catalogues even earlier, in 1895. The aforementioned 1894 triptych Cinderella was also, in all probability, made with an already completed example. Bergheim therefore seems to have had access to some kind of pre-production or test version even earlier.
It is, to put it mildly, a wonderfully peculiar and temperamental contraption. Three principal versions existed, No. 1 through No. 3. Although relatively few were made and surviving examples are now absurdly rare, they remained listed in catalogues well into the 1930s. You may encounter (well, you probably won't... :()—versions with iris diaphragms or Waterhouse stops, barrels in golden or blackened brass, and later examples made from aluminium alloys.
All versions used a telephoto construction, so they required far less bellows draw than their enormous focal lengths might suggest, which was rather useful. Except for the No. 1, the focal length was variable, and increasing it reduced the effective aperture. The rack-and-pinion mechanism moving the barrel therefore did not, unusually, serve to focus the lens. Instead it changed the separation of the optical elements and thus altered the focal length. The lens also suffers magnificently from chromatic aberrations. The telephoto construction produces substantial lateral chromatic aberration, while longitudinal causes the particularly unpleasant problem of chemical focus shift. Add low light transmission and exceptionally soft rendering—even by contemporary standards—and focusing the bloody thing becomes extraordinarily, spectacularly, MEGAHARD.
| No.1 510mm f9 | No.2 635-1000mm f8-12 | No.3 890-1400mm f9-15 |
|---|---|---|
| The only version originally made with a fixed focal length. According to some records, a revision around 1912 introduced a variable focal length of roughly 320–915mm and a variable aperture of f6.5–20. I have not been able to verify this. | Variable focal length as standard. I am, however, aware of several unusual examples with slightly different focal ranges. One of them happens to be mine (hehehe): 740–1100 mm. | The tubular champion of all tubes. Stories exist of a mysterious version of unknown designation covering roughly 280–900mm at a fixed f6. This one, however, seems to survive only in catalogues—and frankly those specifications sound suspiciously good. |
- Because the f-number is calculated as the ratio between FL and the diameter of the entrance pupil, a fixed physical aperture diameter produced a different effective f-number at every setting. Common aperture markings would therefore have made no sense. The figures engraved on the barrel—1, X, 2, 3 and so on—indicate only the size of the opening, not its relative aperture. The higher the number, the greater the sharpness and the lesser character. “X” should be some sort of optimum, the most visually pleasing setting.
- Since chromatic aberration changes relatively little when stopping down, altering the aperture mainly changes the balance between the aberrations while the chromatic remains present. The image therefore never becomes entirely crisp, although the degree of luminous sparkle and glow in the highlights, produced by spherical aberration, diminishes as the lens is stopped down. The aperture thus doubles as a soft-focus control.
- As for chemical focus shift: the human eye is most sensitive to different parts of the spectrum than the photographic materials of the period, and an uncorrected lens brings wavelengths to focus in different planes. A photographer could see a perfectly focused image on the ground glass and still end up with a blurred photograph unless the focus was shifted before exposure. This affected collodion, some orthochromatic materials and other processes primarily sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum.
- So you focus correctly and it is still bloody blurred. Various rules of thumb existed, including shifting the focus by roughly 1/60 of the bellows draw or moving the plane of focus “from the ears towards the eyes”, but there is no universal value for one standardised unit of ear. Because working with this sort of equipment is obviously far too easy already, someone had to throw in an invisible variable that changes every time, yeah.
- And just to make matters even more entertaining, using my No.2 with a Sinar shutter introduces another limitation: the distance between the lens and the shutter opening. When shortening the focal length (which means extending the barrel, exactly the opposite of what instinct suggests) the rear element moves farther from the shutter hole, and despite sufficient optical coverage the image begins to vignette mechanically.
By now you have probably gathered that operating this thing is not exactly straightforward. Determining exposure is about as enjoyable as walking barefoot across LEGO, and it is hardly surprising that photographers used exposure tables prepared by the manufacturer, finding the correct setting at the intersection of the relevant values. After all, the original requirement was to produce a lens whose image resembled the diffusion of a pinhole camera, and in that respect Dallmeyer's design performed admirably. Nobody promised to reduce the suffering of the poor large-format photographer.
Resolution
No, I'm kidding. I actually love using the damned thing. Apart from its very distinctive rendering (if I had to compare it, the Puyo/Pulligny construction probably comes closest, perhaps because of the similar use of chromatic aberration) those extremely long and variable focal lengths are useful.
- At last I can photograph VDS²—Very Distant Stuff, Very Damn Softly. On one occasion I hauled the Sinar and No. 2 up Oblík hill to photograph Hazmburk Castle. I felt rather like De Niro in The Mission, penitently dragging a sack of conquistador junk through the jungle. I nearly died doing it, but one day I'll drag all this bloody hardware all the way to Iguaçu Falls as well!!
Success with the Bergheim is therefore particularly satisfying. And I will not lie, there is also something rather wonderful about photographing with a piece of equipment that helped shape history. Despite its limited practicality and its rendering appealing to a fairly narrow group of photographers, the lens did not become a blind evolutionary alley. Instead, it stood at the beginning of an emerging generation of purpose-built soft-focus optics. Pinkham & Smith Semi-Achromatic. Bodine. Spencer Port-Land. Struss...
Long before Bergheim, photographers had of course already used uncorrected lenses, deliberate focus shifts, diffusion materials and every conceivable indecency. The Vienna Camera Club worked with simple lenses. Cameron had been soft decades earlier. The Dallmeyer Patent Portrait allowed spherical aberration to be varied. What made J. S. B. a visionary was that he was not content merely to bend existing tools to his purposes. He knew precisely what he wanted, and together with T. R. D. he was willing to create it.
The memory of art, however, is not particularly kind to this pioneer. After his death in 1912, Bergheim gradually faded from wider awareness. Surprisingly, his artistic legacy survives primarily through the lens rather than his photographs, which remain little known and poorly documented. Perhaps that is partly because his extraordinary versatility overshadows each individual achievement. And that, in itself, may be the most admirable thing about him.
Bergheim—man and lens alike—did not really retreat from progress. They merely took another, unexplored road forward.
P.S.
And yes, towards the end of his life J. S. B. somehow also found time to become a respected orchid grower... According to The Orchid World, in 1912 he was exhibiting specimens at Belsize Court including Bulbophyllum nudiscapum and Angraecum O'Brienianum.
Leave a Reply