{"id":2759,"date":"2026-09-04T19:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/negativnacestach.cz\/?p=2759"},"modified":"2026-10-06T12:30:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:30:29","slug":"dallmeyer-bergheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/negativnacestach.cz\/en\/dallmeyer-bergheim\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallmeyer Bergheim"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Dallmeyer-Bergheim\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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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\u2014or rather, backwards\u2014into ancient Jerusalem and a past steeped in an eclectic mixture of brass, petroleum and orchids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exposition<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to the Long 19th Century<\/a>, when the breakneck pace of progress spared neither photographic optics nor much else besides. From my earlier article<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a>, treasurer of the London Wagner Society and member of the committee appointed by the London Dialectical Society<\/a> to investigate spiritualist phenomena. The Renaissance may have ended, but Renaissance men apparently had not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little later he also began to drill, baby, drill<\/a>. He travelled to Petrolia<\/a>, 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Portrait<\/a>
Portrait of J. S. Bergheim, John Saint-Helier Lander (1909)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Collision<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> manner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Rijksmuseum records early portraits and studies of women<\/a> 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\u2014quite obviously with artistic rather than technical intent. Heinrich K\u00fchn<\/a> 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<\/a>. He's hooked!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His technocratic left hemisphere appears to take a holiday while the rest of him works like a Styrian cart horse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n