Originally published in The New Yorker, September 24, 2007
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?
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.
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.
