By Anthony Lane.
Originally published in The
New Yorker, September 24, 2007, long before Leica moved to their new
headquarters at Leitz Park in Wetzlar.
Leica advertising from 1935
Fifty miles north of
Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms. Turn off the main thoroughfare
and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached
houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August, not a soul
in sight. Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans: you can imagine
coming here for coffee and cakes with your aunt, but that would be the limit of
excitement. By the time you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, the town has almost
petered out; just before the railway line, however, there is a clutch of
industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sign outside. As far as fanfare is
concerned, that’s about it. But here is the place to go, if you want to find
the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world.
Many people would disagree.
Bugatti fans, for instance, would direct your attention to the Type 57
Atlantic, the only car I know that appears to have been designed by masseuses.
Personally, I would consider it a privilege to die at the wheel of a Lamborghini
Miura—not difficult, when you’re nudging a hundred and seventy m.p.h. and
waving at passersby. But automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms
run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with
such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered
fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather
than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look
not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a
Leica.
There have been Leica cameras
since 1925, when the Leica I was introduced at a trade fair in Leipzig. From
then on, as the camera has evolved over eight decades, generations of users
have turned to it in their hour of need, or their millisecond of inspiration.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert
Capa, Robert Frank, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and
Sebastião Salgado: these are some of the major-league names that are associated
with the Leica brand—or, in the case of Cartier-Bresson, stuck to it with
everlasting glue.
Even if you don’t follow
photography, your mind’s eye will still be full of Leica photographs. The
famous head shot of Che Guevara, reproduced on millions of rebellious T-shirts
and student walls: that was taken on a Leica with a portrait lens—a short
telephoto of 90 mm.—by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Korda, in 1960.
How about the pearl-gray smile-cum-kiss reflected in the wing mirror of a car,
taken by Elliott Erwitt in 1955? Leica again, as is the even more celebrated
smooch caught in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945—a sailor craned over a nurse,
bending her backward, her hand raised against his chest in polite
half-protestation. The man behind the camera was Alfred Eisenstaedt, of Life
magazine, who recalled:
I was running ahead of him
with my Leica, looking back over my shoulder. But none of the pictures that
were possible pleased me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being
grabbed. I turned around and clicked.
He took four pictures, and
that was that. “It was done within a few seconds,” he said. All you need to
know about the Leica is present in those seconds. The photographer was on the
run, so whatever he was carrying had to be light and trim enough not to be a
drag. He swivelled and fired in one motion, like the Sundance Kid. And
everything happened as quickly for him as it did for the startled nurse, with
all the components—the angles, the surrounding throng, the shining white of her
dress and the kisser’s cap—falling into position. Times Square was the arena of
uncontrolled joy; the job of the artist was to bring it under control, and the
task of his camera was to bring life—or, at least, an improved version of it, graced
with order and impact—to the readers of Life.
Eisenstaedt and his Leicas
Still, why should one lump of
metal and glass be better at fulfilling that duty than any other? Would
Eisenstaedt really have been worse off, or failed to hit the target, with
another sort of camera? These days, Leica makes digital compacts and a beefy
S.L.R., or single-lens reflex, called the R9, but for more than fifty years the
pride of the company has been the M series of 35-mm. range-finder cameras—durable,
companionable, costly, and basically unchanging, like a spouse. There are three
current models, one of which, the MP, will set you back a throat-drying four
thousand dollars or so; having stood outside dustless factory rooms, in Solms,
and watched women in white coats and protective hairnets carefully applying
black paint, with a slender brush, to the rim of every lens, I can tell you
exactly where your money goes. Mind you, for four grand you don’t even get a
lens—just the MP body. It sits there like a gum without a tooth until you add a
lens, the cheapest being available for just under a thousand dollars. (Five and
a half thousand will buy you a 50-mm. f/1, the widest lens on the market; for
anybody wanting to shoot pictures by candlelight, there’s your answer.) If you
simply want to take a nice photograph of your children, though, what’s wrong
with a Canon PowerShot? Yours online for just over two hundred bucks, the
PowerShot SD1000 will also zoom, focus for you, set the exposure for you, and advance
the frame automatically for you, none of which the MP, like some sniffing
aristocrat, will deign to do. To make the contest even starker, the SD1000 is a
digital camera, fizzing with megapixels, whereas the Leica still stores images
on that frail, combustible material known as film. Short of telling the kids to
hold still while you copy them onto parchment, how much further out of touch
could you be?
To non-photographers, Leica,
more than any other manufacturer, is a legend with a hint of scam: suckers
paying through the nose for a name, in a doomed attempt to crank up the
credibility of a picture they were going to take anyway, just as weekend
golfers splash out on a Callaway Big Bertha in a bid to convince themselves
that, with a little more whippiness in their shaft, they will swell into Tiger
Woods. To unrepentant aesthetes, on the other hand, there is something
demeaning in the idea of Leica. Talent will out, they say, whatever the tools
that lie to hand, and in a sense they are right: Woods would destroy us with a
single rusty five-iron found at the back of a garage, and Cartier-Bresson could
have picked up a Box Brownie and done more with a roll of film—summoning his
usual miracles of poise and surprise—than the rest of us would manage with a lifetime
of Leicas. Yet the man himself was quite clear on the matter:
I have never abandoned the
Leica, anything different that I have tried has always brought me back to it. I
am not saying this is the case for others. But as far as I am concerned it is
the camera. It literally constitutes the optical extension of my eye.
Asked how he thought of the
Leica, Cartier-Bresson said that it felt like “a big warm kiss, like a shot
from a revolver, and like the psychoanalyst’s couch.” At this point, five
thousand dollars begins to look like a bargain.
Henry Cartier Bresson with a
Leica
Many reasons have been
adduced for the rise of the Leica. There is the hectic progress of the
illustrated press, avid for photographs to fill its columns; there is the
increased mobility, spending power, and leisure time of the middle classes, who
wished to preserve a record of these novel blessings, if not for posterity,
then at least for show. Yet the great inventions, more often than not, are
triggered less by vast historical movements than by the pressures of individual
chance—or, in Leica’s case, by asthma. Every Leica employee who drives down
Oskar-Barnack-Strasse is reminded of corporate glory, for it was Barnack, a
former engineer at Carl Zeiss, the famous lens-makers in Jena, who designed the
Leica I. He was an amateur photographer, and the camera had first occurred to
him, as if in a vision, in 1905, twenty years before it actually went on sale:
Back then I took pictures
using a camera that took 13 by 18 plates, with six double-plate holders and a
large leather case similar to a salesman’s sample case. This was quite a load
to haul around when I set off each Sunday through the Thüringer Wald. While I
struggled up the hillsides (bearing in mind that I suffer from asthma) an idea
came to me. Couldn’t this be done differently?
Five years later, Barnack was
invited to work for Ernst Leitz, a rival optical company, in Wetzlar. (The
company stayed there until 1988, when it was sold, and the camera division,
renamed Leica, shifted to Solms, fifteen minutes away.) By 1913-14, he had developed
what became known as the ur-Leica: a tough, squat rectangular metal box, not
much bigger than a spectacles case, with rounded corners and a retractable
brass lens. You could tuck it into a jacket pocket, wander around the Thuringer
woods all weekend, and never gasp for breath. The extraordinary fact is that,
if you were to place it next to today’s Leica MP, the similarities would far
outweigh the differences; stand a young man beside his own great-grandfather
and you get the same effect.
Barnack took a picture on
August 2, 1914, using his new device. Reproduced in Alessandro Pasi’s
comprehensive study, “Leica: Witness to a Century” (2004), it shows a helmeted
soldier turning away from a column on which he has just plastered the imperial
order for mobilization. This was the first hint of the role that would fall to
Leicas above all other cameras: to be there in history’s face. Not until the
end of hostilities did Barnack resume work on the Leica, as it came to be
called. (His own choice of name was Lilliput, but wiser counsels prevailed.)
Whenever you buy a 35-mm. camera, you pay homage to Barnack, for it was his
handheld invention that popularized the 24-mm.-by-36-mm. negative—a perfect
ratio of 2:3—adapted from cine film. According to company lore, he held a strip
of the new film between his hands and stretched his arms wide, the resulting
length being just enough to contain thirty-six frames—the standard number of
images, ever since, on a roll of 35-mm. film. Well, maybe. Does this mean that,
if Barnack had been more of an ape, we might have got forty?
(Please note: The original prototype, the Ur-Leica did actually hold 40 frames of film, but it needed to be loaded in the dark. To overcome this handicap, Barnack designed a reloadable cassette for the camera, the grandfather of all 34mm film cassettes. Since this took up some space within the camera, the film needed to be shortened to 36 frames.)
When the Leica I made its
eventual début, in 1925, it caused consternation. In the words of one Leica
historian, quoted by Pasi, “To many of the old photographers it looked like a
toy designed for a lady’s handbag.” Over the next seven years, however, nearly
sixty thousand Leica I’s were sold. That’s a lot of handbags. The shutter
speeds on the new camera ran up to one five-hundredth of a second, and the
aperture opened wide to f/3.5. In 1932, the Leica II arrived, equipped with a
range finder for more accurate focussing. I used one the other day—a
mid-thirties model, although production lasted until 1948. Everything still ran
sweetly, including the knurled knob with which you wind on from frame to frame,
and the simplicity of the design made the Leica an infinitely more friendly
proposition, for the novice, than one of the digital monsters from Nikon and
Canon. Those need an instruction manual only slightly smaller than the Old
Testament, whereas the Leica II sat in my palms like a puppy, begging to be
taken out on the streets.
Leica I 1925
Leica II
That is how it struck not
only the public but also those for whom photography was a living, or an
ecstatic pursuit. A German named Paul Wolff acquired a Leica in 1926 and became
a high priest to the brand, winning many converts with his 1934 book “My
Experiences with the Leica.” His compatriot Ilsa Bing, born to a Jewish family
in Frankfurt, was dubbed “the Queen of the Leica” after an exhibit in 1931. She
had bought the camera in 1929, and what is remarkable, as one scrolls through a
roster of her peers, is how quickly, and infectiously, the Leica habit caught
on. Whenever I pick up a book of photographs, I check the chronology at the
back. From a monograph by the Hungarian André Kertész, the most wistful and
tactful of photographers: “1928—Purchases first Leica.” From the catalogue of
the 1998 Aleksandr Rodchenko show at MOMA: “1928, November 25—Stepanova’s diary
records Rodchenko’s purchase of a Leica for 350 rubles.” And on it goes.
Ilse Bing 1932
The Russians were among the
first and fiercest devotees, and anyone who craves the Leica as a pure emblem
of capitalist desire—what Marx would call commodity fetishism—may also like to
reflect on its status, to men like Rodchenko, as a weapon in the revolutionary
struggle. Never a man to be tied down (he was also a painter, sculptor, and
master of collage), he nonetheless believed that “only the camera is capable of
reflecting contemporary life,” and he went on the attack, craning up at
buildings and down from roofs, tipping his Leica at flights of steps and street
parades, upending the world as if all its old complacencies could be shaken out
of the bottom like dust. There is a gorgeous shot from 1934 entitled “Girl with
a Leica,” in which his subject perches politely on a bench that arrows
diagonally, and most impolitely, from lower left to upper right. She wears a
soft white beret and dress, and her gaze is blank and misty, but thrown over
the scene, like a net, is the shadow of a window grille—modernist geometry at
war with reactionary decorum. The object she clasps in her lap, its strap drawn
tightly over her shoulder, is of the same make as the one that created the
picture.
When it came to
off-centeredness, Rodchenko’s fellow-Russian Ilya Ehrenburg went one better. “A
camera is clumsy and crude. It meddles insolently in other people’s affairs,”
he wrote in 1932. “Ours is a guileful age. Following man’s example, things have
also learned to dissemble. For many months I roamed Paris with a little camera.
People would sometimes wonder: why was I taking pictures of a fence or a road?
They didn’t know that I was taking pictures of them.” Ehrenburg had solved the
problem of meddling by buying an accessory: “The Leica has a lateral
viewfinder. It’s constructed like a periscope. I was photographing at 90
degrees.” The Paris that emerged—poor, grimy, and unposed—was a moral rebuke to
the myth of bohemian chic.
You can still buy a
right-angled viewfinder for a new Leica, if you’re too shy or sneaky to
confront your subjects head-on, although the basic thrust of Leica technique
has been to insist that no extra subterfuge is required: the camera can hide
itself. If I had to fix the source of that reticence, I would point to Marseilles
in 1932. It was then that Cartier-Bresson, an aimless young Frenchman from a
wealthy family, bought his first Leica. He proceeded to grow into the
best-known photographer of the twentieth century, in spite (or, as he would
argue, because) of his ability to walk down a street not merely unrecognized
but unnoticed. He began as a painter, and continued to draw throughout his
life, but his hand was most comfortable with a camera.
When I spoke to his widow,
Martine Franck—the president of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, in Paris,
and herself a distinguished photographer—she said that her husband in action
with his Leica “was like a dancer.” This feline unobtrusiveness led him all
over the world and made him seem at home wherever he paused; one trip to Asia
lasted three years, ending in 1950, and produced eight hundred and fifty rolls
of film. His breakthrough collection, published two years later, was called
“The Decisive Moment,” and he sought endless analogies for the sensation that
was engendered by the press of a shutter. The most common of these was hunting:
“The photographer must lie in wait, watching out for his prey, and have a
presentiment of what is about to happen.”
There, if anywhere, is the
Leica motto: watch and wait. If you were a predator, the moment—not just for
Cartier-Bresson, but for all photographers—became that much more decisive in
1954. “Clairvoyance” means “clear sight,” and when Leica launched the M3 that
year, the clarity was a coup de foudre; even now, when you look through a used
M3, the world before you is brighter and crisper than seems feasible. You half
expect to feel the crunch of autumn leaves beneath your feet. A Leica
viewfinder resembles no other, because of the frame lines: thin white strips,
parallel to each side of the frame, which show you the borders of the
photograph that you are set to take—not merely the lie of the land within the
shot, but also what is happening, or about to happen, just outside. This is a
matter of millimetres, but to Leica fans it is sacred, because it allows them
to plan and imagine a photograph as an act of storytelling—an instant grabbed
at will from a continuum. If you want a slice of life, why not see the loaf?
The M3 had everything,
although by the standards of today it had practically nothing. You focussed
manually, of course, and there was nothing to help you calculate the exposure;
either you carried a separate light meter, or you clipped one awkwardly to the
top of the camera, or, if you were cool, you guessed. Cartier-Bresson was cool.
Martine Franck is still cool: “I think I know my light by now,” she told me.
She continues to use her M3: “I’ve never held a camera so beautiful. It fits
the hand so well.” Even for people who know nothing of Cartier-Bresson, and for
whom 1954 is as long ago as Pompeii, something about the M3 clicks into place:
last year, when eBay and Stuff magazine, in the U.K., took it upon themselves
to nominate “the top gadget of all time,” the Game Boy came fifth, the Sony
Walkman third, and the iPod second. First place went to an old camera that
doesn’t even need a battery. If the Queen subscribes to Stuff, she will have
nodded in approval, having owned an M3 since 1958. Her Majesty is so wedded to
her Leica that she was once shown on a postage stamp holding it at the ready.
Queen Eliaabeth with a Leica
M3
It’s no insult to call the M3
a gadget. Such beauty as it possesses flows from its scorn for the superfluous;
as any Bauhaus designer could tell you, form follows function. The M series is
the backbone of Leica; we are now at the M8 (which at first glance is barely
distinguishable from the M3), and, with a couple of exceptions, every
intervening camera has been a classic. Richard Kalvar, who rose to become
president of the Magnum photographic agency during the nineties, remembers
hearing the words of a Leica fan: “I know I’m using the best, and I don’t have
to think about it anymore.” Kalvar bought an M4 and never looked back: “It’s
almost a part of me,” he says. Ralph Gibson, whose photographs offer an
unblinking survey of the textures that surround us, from skin to stone, bought
his first Leica, an M2 (which, confusingly, postdated the M3), in 1961. It cost
him three hundred dollars, which, considering that he was earning a hundred a
week, was quite an outlay, but his loyalty is undimmed. “More great photographs
have been made with a Leica and a 50-mm. lens than with any other combination
in the history of photography,” Gibson said to me. He advised Leica beginners
to use nothing except that standard lens for two or three years, so as to ease
themselves into the swing of the thing: “What you learn you can then apply to
all the other lengths.”
One could argue that, since
the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the sense of Europe as the spiritual hearth
of Leica, with the Paris of Kertész and Cartier-Bresson glowing at its core,
has been complemented, if not superseded, by America’s attraction to the brand.
The Russian love of the angular had exploited the camera’s portability (you try
bending over a window ledge with a plate camera); the French had perfected the
art of reportage, netting experience on the wing; but the Leicas that conquered
America—the M3, the M4, and later the M6, with built-in metering and the round
red Leica logo on the front—were wielded with fresh appetite, biting at the
world and slicing it off in unexpected chunks. Lee Friedlander, photographing a
child in New York, in 1963, thought nothing of bringing the camera down to the
boy’s eye level, and thus semi-decapitating the grownups who stood beside him.
(All kids dream of that sometime.) Men and women were reflected in storefront
windows, or obscured by street signs; many of the photographs shimmered on the
brink of a mistake. “With a camera like that,” Friedlander has said of the
Leica, “you don’t believe that you’re in the masterpiece business. It’s enough
to be able to peck at the world.” One shot of his, from 1969, traps an entire
landscape of feeling—a boundless American sky, salted with high clouds, plus
Friedlander’s wife, Maria, with her lightly smiling face—inside the cab of a
single truck, layering what we see through the side window with what is
reflected in it. I know of long novels that tell you less.
Before Friedlander came
Robert Frank, born in Switzerland; only someone from a mountainous country,
perhaps, could come here and view the United States as a flat and tragic plain.
“The Americans” (1958), the record of his travels with a Leica, was mostly haze,
shade, and grain, stacked with human features resigned to their fate. No artist
had ever studied a men’s room in such detail before, with everything from the
mop to the hand dryer immortalized in the wide embrace of the lens; Jack
Kerouac, who wrote the introduction to the book, lauded the result, taken in
Memphis, Tennessee, as “the loneliest picture ever made, the urinals that women
never see, the shoeshine going on in sad eternity.” Then, there was Garry
Winogrand, the least exhaustible of all photographers. Frank’s eighty-three
images may have been chosen from five hundred rolls of film, but when Winogrand
died, in 1984, at the age of fifty-six, he left behind more than two and a half
thousand rolls of film that hadn’t even been developed. He leavened the
wistfulness of Frank with a documentary bluntness and a grinning wit,
incessantly tilting his Leica to throw a scene off-balance and seek a new
dynamic. His picture of a disabled man in Los Angeles, in 1969, could have been
fuelled by pathos alone, or by political rage at an indifferent society, but
Winogrand cannot stop tracking that society in its comic range; that is why we
get not just the wheelchair and the begging bowl but also a trio of
short-skirted girls, bunched together like a backup group, strolling through
the Vs of shadow and sunlight, and a portly matron planted at the right of the
frame—a stolid import from another age.
I recently found a picture of
Winogrand’s M4. The metal is not just rubbed but visibly worn down beside the
wind-on lever; you have to shoot a heck of a lot of photographs on a Leica
before that happens. Still, his M4 is in mint condition compared with the M2
owned by Bruce Davidson, the American photographer whose work constitutes,
among other things, an invaluable record of the civil-rights movement. And even
his M2, pitted and peeled like the bark of a tree, is pristine compared with
the Leica I saw in the display case at the Leica factory in Solms. That model
had been in the Hindenburg when it went up in flames in New Jersey in 1937. The
heat was so intense that the front of the lenses melted. So now you know: Leica
engineers test their product to the limits, and they will customize it for you
if you are planning a trip to the Arctic, but when you really want to trash
your precious camera you need an exploding airship.
Winogrand's Leica M4
If you pick up an M-series
Leica, two things are immediately apparent. First, the density: the object sits
neatly but not lightly in the hand, and a full day’s shooting, with the camera
continually hefted to the eye, leaves you with a faint but discernible case of
wrist ache. Second, there is no lump. Most of the smarter, costlier cameras in
the world are S.L.R.s, with a lumpy prism on top. Light enters through the
lens, strikes an angled mirror, and bounces upward to the prism, where it
strikes one surface after another, like a ball in a squash court, before
exiting through the viewfinder. You see what your lens sees, and you focus
accordingly. This happy state of affairs does not endure. As you take a
picture, the mirror flips up out of the light path. The image, now
unobstructed, reaches straight to the rear of the camera and, as the shutter
opens, burns into the emulsion of the film—or, these days, registers on a
digital sensor. With every flip, however, comes a flip side: the mirror shuts
off access to the prism, meaning that, at the instant of release, your vision
is blocked, and you are left gazing at the dark.
To most of us, this is not a
problem. The instant passes, the mirror flips back down, and lo, there is
light. For some photographers, though, the impediment is agony: of all the
times to deny us the right to look at our subject, S.L.R.s have to pick this
one? “Visualus interruptus,” Ralph Gibson calls it, and here is where the Leica
M series plays its ace. The Leica is lumpless, with a flat top built from a
single piece of brass. It has no prism, because it focuses with a range
finder—situated above the lens. And it has no mirror inside, and therefore no
clunk as the mirror swings. When you take a picture with an S.L.R., there is a
distinctive sound, somewhere between a clatter and a thump; I worship my
beat-up Nikon FE, but there is no denying that every snap reminds me of a cow
kicking over a milk pail. With a Leica, all you hear is the shutter, which is
the quietest on the market. The result—and this may be the most seductive
reason for the Leica cult—is that a photograph sounds like a kiss.
From the start, this tinge of
diplomatic subtlety has shaded our view of the Leica, not always helpfully. The
M-series range finder feels made for the finesse and formality of
black-and-white—yet consider the oeuvre of William Eggleston, whose unabashed
use of color has delivered, through Leica lenses, a lesson in everyday American
surrealism, which, like David Lynch movies, blooms almost painfully bright.
Again, the Leica, with its range of wide-aperture lenses, is the camera for
natural light, and thus inimical to flash, yet Lee Friedlander conjured a
series of plainly flashlit nudes, in the nineteen-seventies, which finds
tenderness and dignity in the brazen. Lastly, a Leica is, before anything else,
a 35-mm. camera. Barnack shaped the Leica I around a strip of film, and the
essential mission of the brand since then has been to guarantee that a single
chemical event—the action of light on a photosensitive surface—passes off as
smoothly as possible. Picture the scene, then, in Cologne, in the fall of 2006.
At Photokina, the biennial fair of the world’s photographic trade, Leica made
an announcement: it was time, we were told, for the M8. The M series was going
digital. It was like Dylan going electric.
In a way, this had to happen.
The tide of our lives is surging in a digital direction. My complete childhood
is distilled into a couple of photograph albums, with the highlights, whether
of achievement or embarrassment, captured in no more than a dozen talismanic
stills, now faded and curling at the edges. Yet our own children go on one
school trip and return with a hundred images stashed on a memory card: will
that enhance or dilute their later remembrance of themselves? Will our
experience be any the richer for being so retrievable, or could an individual
history risk being wiped, or corrupted, as briskly as a memory card? Garry
Winogrand might have felt relieved to secure those thousands of images on a
hard drive, rather than on frangible film, although it could be that the taking
of a photograph meant more to him than the printed result. The jury is out, but
one thing is for sure: film is dwindling into a minority taste, upheld largely
by professionals and stubborn, nostalgic perfectionists. Nikon now offers
twenty-two digital models, for instance, while the “wide array of SLR film
cameras,” as promised on its Web site, numbers precisely two.
Even a company like Leica,
servant to the devout, has felt the brunt. For the fiscal year 2004-05, the
company posted losses of almost twenty million euros (nearly twenty-six million
dollars), and in 2005 the banks partially terminated its credit lines; in
short, Leica was heading for extinction. Since then, there has been something
of a turnaround. Major restructuring is still under way, with a new C.E.O.—a
genial Californian called Steven K. Lee—brought in to oversee the changes.
According to a report of June 20, 2007, the past year has seen the company
inching back into profitability, and much of that improvement is due to the M8.
The camera’s birth was fraught with complications, and reports streamed in from
owners that in certain conditions, thanks to a glitch in the sensor, black was
showing up on digital images as deep purple—troubling news if you happened to
be shooting a portrait of Dracula, or a Guinness commercial. There were also
rumblings about the quality of the focus, which is the last thing you expect
from a Leica. One well-known photographer described the camera to me as
“unusable,” and said he sometimes felt like throwing it against a wall. But the
company responded: cameras were recalled to the factory, Lee signed four
thousand letters of apology, and the crisis passed. Nevertheless, the camera
still needs a filter fixed to every lens to correct its vision, and Leica will
want to do better next time. When I asked Lee about the possibility of an M9—an
upgraded M8, with all the kinks ironed out—he smiled and said nothing.
Lee knows what is at stake,
being a Leica-lover of long standing. Asked about the difference between using
his product and an ordinary camera, he replied: “One is driving a Morgan
four-by-four down a country lane, the other one is getting in a Mercedes
station wagon and going a hundred miles an hour.” The problem is that, for
photographers as for drivers, the most pressing criterion these days is speed,
and anything more sluggish than the latest Mercedes—anything, likewise, not
tricked out with luxurious extras—belongs to the realm of heritage. There is an
astonishing industry in used Leicas, with clubs and forums debating such vital
areas of contention as the strap lugs introduced in 1933. There are collectors
who buy a Leica and never take it out of the box; others who discreetly amass
the special models forged for the Luftwaffe. Ralph Gibson once went to a
meeting of the Leica Historical Society of America and, he claims, listened to
a retired Marine Corps general give a scholarly paper on certain discrepancies
in the serial numbers of Leica lens caps. “Leicaweenies,” Gibson calls such
addicts, and they are part of the charming, unbreakable spell that the name
continues to cast, as well as a tribute to the working longevity of the
cameras. By an unfortunate irony, the abiding virtues of the secondhand slow
down the sales of the new: why buy an M8 when you can buy an M3 for a quarter
of the price and wind up with comparable results? The economic equation is
perverse: “I believe that for every euro we make in sales, the market does four
euros of business,” Lee said.
Ralph Gibson's Leica MP
I have always wanted a Leica,
ever since I saw an Edward Weston photograph of Henry Fonda, his noble profile
etched against the sky, a cigarette between two fingers, and a Leica resting
against the corduroy of his jacket. I have used a variety of cultish cameras,
all of them secondhand at least, and all based on a negative larger than 35
mm.: a Bronica, a Mamiya 7, and the celebrated twin-lens Rolleiflex, which
needs to be cupped at waist height. (“If the good Lord had wanted us to take
photographs with a 6 by 6, he would have put eyes in our belly,” a scornful
Cartier-Bresson said.) But I have never used a Leica. Now I own one: a small,
dapper digital compact called the D-Lux 3. It has a fine lens, and its grace
note is a retro leather case that makes me feel less like Henry Fonda and more
like a hiker named Helmut, striding around the Black Forest in long socks and a
dark-green hat with a feather in it; but a D-Lux 3 is not an M8. For one thing,
it doesn’t have a proper viewfinder. For another, it costs close to six hundred
dollars—the upper limit of my budget, but laughably cheap to anyone versed in the
M series. So, to discover what I was missing, I rented an M8 and a 50-mm. lens
for four hours, from a Leica dealer, and went to work.
If you can conquer the slight
queasiness that comes from walking about with seven thousand dollars’ worth of
machinery hanging around your neck, an afternoon with the M8 is a dangerously
pleasant groove to get into. I can understand that, were you a sports
photographer, perched far away from the action, or a paparazzo, fighting to
squeeze off twenty consecutive frames of Britney Spears falling down outside a
night club, this would not be your tool of choice, but for more patient mortals
it feels very usable indeed. This is not just a question of ergonomics, or of
the diamond-like sharpness of the lens. Rather, it has to do with the old,
bewildering Leica trick: the illusion, fostered by a mere machine, that the
world out there is asking to be looked at—to be caught and consumed while it is
fresh, like a trout. Ever since my teens, as one substandard print after
another glimmered into view in the developing tray, under the brothel-red gloom
of the darkroom, my own attempts at photography have meant a lurch of
expectation and disappointment. Now, with an M8 in my possession, the shame
gave way to a thrill. At one point, I stood outside a bookstore and, in a bid
to test the exposure, focused on a pair of browsers standing within, under an
“Antiquarian” sign at the end of a long shelf. Suddenly, a pale blur entered
the frame lines. I panicked, and pressed the shutter: kiss.
On the digital playback, I
inspected the evidence. The blur had been an old lady, and she had emerged as a
phantom—the complete antiquarian, with glowing white hair and a hint of
spectacles. It wasn’t a good photograph, more of a still from “Ghostbusters,”
but it was funnier and punchier than anything I had taken before, and I could
only have grabbed it with a Leica. (And only with an M. By the time the D-Lux 3
had fired up and focused, the lady would have floated halfway down the street.)
So the rumors were true: buy this camera, and accidents will happen. I
remembered what Cartier-Bresson once said about turning from painting to
photography: “the adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker
instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.” That is what links him to
the Leicaweenies, and Oskar Barnack to the advent of the M8, and Russian
revolutionaries to flashlit American nudes: the simple, undying wish to look at
the scars.
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To comment or to read comments please scroll past the ads below.
All ads present items of interest to Leica owners.
Inventive Camera Bags for All of Your Gear
For more information on KOMARU and for orders go to: www.taos-photographic.com
For more information and pre orders go to: www.lenstab.com
Leica Akademie Chicago
with Craig Semetko - August 2015
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Order: info@gmpphoto.com
Please make payment via PayPal to GMP Photography
Click on image to enlarge
Order: info@gmpphoto.com
Please make payment via PayPal to GMP Photography
Click on image to enlarge
Order: info@gmpphoto.com
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Please make payment via PayPal to GMP Photography
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