By Heinz Richter
A picture is worth a thousand words. How often have we heard that old saying? But does that make a camera worth over 2 million dollars? Apparently it does, at least as far as the favorite camera of LIFE magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan goes. He is best known for his war photographs and the intimate images of his friend Pablo Picasso.
The WestLicht gallery of Vienna, Austria a while ago auctioned off a Leica M3D which used to belong to David Douglas Duncan. It sold for $2.19 million which is a record for a commercially produced camera.
Leica M3D with attached Leicavit
Suzy Banks, a writer at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which has Duncan's archive, explained:
"By the time Duncan began photographing the war in Vietnam, he was shooting with Leica M3Ds (D for Duncan), which the company manufactured and designed especially for him, limiting production to four. The battle-hardened camera, curiously enough, also proved ideally suited for one of Duncan's subsequent and more intimate topics: Pablo Picasso and his family. With its soft-click shutter, this camera helped the photographer document the artist's private moments as unobtrusively as possible."
While the claim of this being the most valuable commercially produced camera in history is correct, the highest price ever paid for any camera is also for a Leica. That title used to go to one of the original pre-production Leicas, the so-called 0-Serie, which was sold for $2.79 million, also by WestLicht.
Leica O-Series Camera
That record, however, was thoroughly demolished by yet another Leica, another one of the 0-series cameras. Camera 105 was the personal camera of Oskar Barnack. After his death it became the property of his son Conrad. He lent it to the Deutsches Museum in Munich for several years, but eventually sold it to an American Leica collector. At a recent auction by Leitz Photographica Auction the camera was sold for the astonishing price of 14.4 million euros.
The only Leica which is even more rare is the original prototype, the Ur-Leica. One can only wonder what a collector would be willing to pay for it. After all, it is the camera that started photography as we know it.
The one that started it all, the Ur-Leica
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