Category Archives: Leica History

Digital Technology and Its Discontents

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Photo A:  A Man With a Leica, Circa 1950. Photo B: A Man With a Leica, Circa 2015. What Does The One Have to Do With The Other?

I love Leica film cameras. And as much as I love Leica film cameras, I remain profoundly ambivalent about Leica digital cameras. God knows I’ve tried to like them. I own an M8, my second, bought shortly after I sold my first and regretted not having it around. It’s an interesting digital camera, unlike the bloated plastic and magnesium monsters offered by Nikon and Canon. But the economy of means possessed by the film cameras somehow feels absent in the Digital M’s, the traditional M’s restrained simplicity having crossed over in the digital models to an ostentatious austerity, attention to necessary details having evolved into the excessively fussy.

The digital M’s even look inauthentic in some undefined way, maybe in the way a self-consciously “retro” edition looks in relation to the real thing. If it were just the aesthetics of the cameras themselves, I could overlook it, but it’s the experience the digital versions provide that’s unsettling for me. Every time I use my M8  it feels odd in some way, like a simulation of the “real” experience I enjoy when using a film M. The cameras themselves might share a similarity of form, but that’s where the similarities end. The respective experiences themselves bear almost no relation to each other. You might as well be engaged in different activities. And isn’t that traditionally why photographers have loved and used Leicas; why they’ve always paid a premium for them, the simplified elegance of the photographic act they allow?

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The tools you use to create structure what you create. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford argues that genuine agency arises in the context of submission to the tools we use, tools that have their own intractable ways. The important thing to remember, if you agree with Crawford, is that the experience we can have is dependant on the tool we chose to use. The design of a tool conditions the kind of involvement we will have in the activity. Some tools are better adapted to the requirements of skillful, unimpeded action, while other tools can prevent skillful self-assertion and can compromise the experience of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world.

I would argue that this is especially true for photography. You can choose digital technology for its quickness and ease of use, but at the certain cost to your own creative autonomy and of your experience of the craft you are engaged in. Or you can use traditional analogue processes and more fully engage your own skillful involvement to create something.

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Valentina, Red’s Java House, San Francisco, Arista.edu 400 @800 iso in Diafine.

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While the digital/analogue argument will seem a tired exercise in nostalgia for most photographers, there remain deep biological factors at play that militate against it ever being completely resolved for some of us. Historically, creating something required a tactile interaction with materials and substances, the result of a deep intelligence that could not be learned without material manipulation and embodied experiences and an understanding of the cause and effect relationship that exists between actions and their consequences.

The hand and handiwork is a major thing that sets humans apart as a species. The earliest divergence of the species that evolved into modern humans began with an evolutionary reconfiguration of the hand allowing sophisticated tool use. You can make the case that this is, literally, what defines us as human animals, and argue that rationality, what is commonly understood to be the uniquely human, came along as a byproduct of the use of tools, as sort of a evolutionary development of the neural software necessary for tool use.

Digital virtuality is propelling us further and further away from physical, tangible experience. What is lacking in the new digital photographic paradigm is the physical experience of photography, the activity that has traditionally constituted photography, the physical making as part of the creative process. The singular final print, the end result of a chosen process of varieties of film, the mechanics of the camera, the physical activities of developing and printing.

We are in danger of losing the sense of the photograph as a physical thing. A photograph is not only seen—it is touched, read, received and manipulated. It is fully appreciated only as a product of this physical relationship, and in that relationship it will always remain elusive, a handmade object irreducible to any single dimension. The most detailed digital rendering, what you might view on your computer screen,  preserves only a vestige of the physical photograph’s real, dynamic nature. Yes, you can print a digitally produced photograph, but how many people do?

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Contemporary photography has a certain look, a function of its technology. It’s the reason many of us still shoot film. Some of us still see certain creative possibilities in ‘The Film Look’ that aren’t given us with digital capture. So, if and when digital technology advances to the point that it can reproduce the appearance of films and formats precisely, will the process of analogue alone be enough to keep some of us using it? For hand made processes, where their idiosyncrasies are intrinsic to the print, undoubtedly. But what of industrial films, which were designed to react with light in a consistent way without variation?

To paraphrase Elliott Erwitt, photography should be taken seriously and treated as an avocation. We should love the doing of it and do it for that reason. And I think a big part of this is engagement in the process, and in that respect I find traditional photographic processes much more rewarding, partly because they embody a certain set of skills that reward detailed attention and experienceThe analogy to cooking comes to mind: Taking photos digitally and editing them on a computer is like cooking a TV diner in a microwave. The film process is a gourmet meal cooked with attention to every step in the process. Film process – how demanding it is to use as a craft — is its enduring strength, but it’s also why film is now a niche with no aspirations to popular appeal, aimed squarely at discerning users, while the convenience of digital has made it the tool of choice for the average guy who just wants to photograph something.

Analogue users belong to the future because they are guardians of the past. Let’s hope we film aficionados, the people who occupy that niche, are able through our efforts to keep film alive for future generations. Technological change is too often a “Faustian bargain” in which something is sacrificed in order for something new to be gained. Will we sacrifice what is of real value in the photographic experience for the new we’ve gained?

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Another Leica Fish Story

BP M3 5414 3I found this recently, posted to a popular online photography forum by someone who knows a lot about cameras and, as best I can tell, isn’t prone to spreading ridiculous stories on the net:

OK, I’ve seen my share of camera bargains. They include an early Nikon One which sold for $12.50 at a yard sale (one of 4 cameras sold for a total of $75), another Nikon One advertised recently on Craig’s list for $375, an unsynced Nikon M four lens outfit thrown away in the trash, and an original chrome Leica MP outfit also thrown away in the trash.

Well, this beats them all hands down and comes from a retired New York City police photographer whose word I trust completely. He writes:

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“Back in July 2002, I was leaving my apartment and across the street where my police car was parked a young couple was having a yard sale to help fund their wedding.

I noticed a Black and Tan Nikon duffel bag on the ground near a small table.

I walk over, and they greeted me as their neighbor but didn’t know my name. When I went to pick up the duffle bag, I noticed on the table:
•2 original Black Leica MP’s both with matching black paint Summicron 50/2

•Leica 72 Half Frame Camera

• 2 Black 50/1.2 and 1 Chrome 50/1.2 Noctilux lenses

• a 250 Reporter GG

• 3 Black Paint M3’s with Leicavits and a bunch of other stuff.

They had small round adhesive stickers on everything. The MP’s were selling for $15 each, lenses $10, etc. I added everything up on the table and if I bought everything, it would’ve cost me $115. The young man said:

“If You take everything, just give me $100 even and the bag is on me.

I asked them to give me some history behind those cameras and lenses and the young lady said:

“It was my Dad’s Stuff. He passed away a few years ago. These can look pretty as decor if you’re into photography. No one here is really into it, besides the fact they probably don’t make film for them anymore.”

The Young Man chimed in an said:

“I don’t even know where the film goes”

I requested of the young lady:

“Would you mind fetching me a bed sheet or table cloth if you don’t mind”

She replied:

“Why?”

I replied:

“I want to cover this table while I give my broker a chance to drive up from the city because you probably have between $300,000-$500,000 worth of vintage German Camera equipment and I will stay here with you until he arrives”

The young lady had her hand over her mouth, and about 30 seconds later both of them broke down in tears.

When my photography broker arrived and did his thing, he said:

“You’re a much better man than me because I would’ve walked off with everything…But it’s pretty cool, I suppose it was the right thing to do”

I replied:

“It wasn’t the right thing to do…it was the Human thing to do”

This was a young suburban couple struggling to start a life together. I didn’t even contemplate “Should I or Shouldn’t I”…
They were a young and innocent couple who didn’t know any better. I look at it from a standpoint that I wouldn’t want that done to me.”

A great yarn, no doubt, but could it possibly be true? I guess it could, but I’m betting against it. In any event, if you believe it, I’ve got a bridge I might be willing to part with on very favorable terms.

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We’ve all heard the stories over the years – the Leica MP with Leicavit turning up in a dead uncle’s closet, the black paint Nikon SP on craigslist for $15, the guy who buys a black paint M3 at a yard sale in New Jersey along with all the appropriate documents attesting to its authenticity. I suppose these could really have happened just like the story says, but, knowing human nature, I suspect the stories have morphed from an initial kernel of curious truth to the status of “fish story.” [It’s not like I’m not susceptible to the phenomenon – My story of “meeting” HCB does have a kernel of truth: in 2004 I saw him at the opening of a Sarah Moon show in Paris. Of course, as I am apt to tell the story now after a bourbon or two, HCB and Sarah Moon came to my Paris exhibition and then we all went out for coffee afterwards.]

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And it’s not like there aren’t some incredible finds out there if you get lucky. Probably 20 years ago a friend casually mentioned to me that he had a box in his closet filled with old junk cameras from his uncle. I asked him to get it out and show it to me. Upon opening the box I found an M2, an M3, a LTM Nicca, and 4 or 5 Leitz lenses, including a Canadian 35mm Summicron and a Super Angulon with finder. Being the good guy I am, I fought off the urge to offer him $25 for the lot and helped him clean everything up and sell it on Ebay, netting him a cool few thousand bucks and me a free M2 for my labors. And then there’s been an item or two bought from ignorant sellers in arms length transactions that have netted some seriously nice kit for bargain prices – a IIIg with a W-Nikkor 35mm 1.8 LTM lens I bought for a few hundred and then turned around and sold for $2500 ($1900 for the Nikkor, $600 for the IIIg); a IIIg with pristine collapsible Summicron for a few hundred, etc.

But there’s something about the reported event that doesn’t pass the smell test. First, how is it that the “Dad” just happens to accumulate an incredible amount of rare, collectible stuff, it and it only? You’d think there’d have to be a few pedestrian items too, a Canonet or a Minolta SRT-101 in there somewhere. Three Noctilux? Really? And think of it this way – if “Dad” really was as important a guy as his camera collection indicates, don’t you think his kids might have some sense that what he had was valuable? But the kicker for me, the “tell” as it were, is in the inconsequential details (isn’t it always?): “they probably don’t make film for them anymore….” Sounds like a reasonsble thing for a clueless kid raised in digital to say in 2016, but in 2002? In 2002 film cameras were normal; it was digital that was esoteric.

So, In spite of my sense that the original poster honestly believes the story, I’m calling BS. It is, however, a lovely fish story.

Oh, and did I ever tell you about the time HCB and Sarah Moon came to my show in Paris?

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Why I (Still) Love Leica

leica m-a 2In a world where most manufacturers have abandoned all-metal construction and favor automated assembly, Leica M bodies and lenses continue to push the envelope of supremely compact, superbly constructed, photographic tools. Their newest optical offerings, the 24/1.4 and 28/1.4, continue the tradition of cost-is-no-object over-the-top excellence for which Leica is known.

You have to pay through the nose for it, yes, but a Leica product is always going to be as good as it gets; certainly its never going to be just average, or worse, mediocre. Leica’s philosophy of cost-is-no-object excellence may not be compatible with your wallet, but it’s consistent with its history, where no compromise excellence has always been the guiding principle.

Leica doesn’t release a product and immediately orphan it. Witness the sensor kerfuffle with the M9, a camera which is now 8 years long in the tooth. Your 2008 M9 sensor having problems in 2016? No problem – send it to Leica for a free replacement. That’s commitment to one’s product. Of course, critics will point out that, given Leica’s price points, that should be expected. Both perspectives are correct, but give Leica credit for meeting its end of the bargain, which, in this age of rapacious capitalism and corporations whose main object is not to serve their client base but rather screw them as quickly and efficiently as possible, seems an increasingly a quaint anomaly.

Leica doesn’t release marginal lenses for high prices to protect their higher-end products. Leica doesn’t release marginal anything (with the obvious exception of some of the more ridiculous collector’s editions, which seem to me almost an ironic inside corporate joke). Leica’s design and philosophy is simple and well-known. Create the best, cost be damned. Make people pay for it, and be proud of it. If you don’t like it, feel free to go elsewhere.

No other camera company is doing that. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic, all of them, in addition to some stellar top of the line stuff, release marginal lenses, cheap cameras, incoherent products; and when the do offer a good product, they usually abandon them in short order, moving on to the next gimmick to sell to what they clearly consider a gullible and easily fleeced client base. Fuji is the only other company that even comes close to Leica’s design philosophy, and you can see the attraction Fuji’s products have for aspiring digital Leicaphiles; a Fuji has become the standard entry level Leica alternative for those looking for what Leica offers but unwilling or unable to afford the price premium.

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155c4d30148bc15c46dec2db8fe1fff0As an example of differing design philosophies, let’s talk about how digital camera companies design well-corrected lenses.  Digital technology has opened new opportunities for camera companies to make “better” optics via software correction. In camera, previously destructive things such as aberration, distortion, vignetting, and flare can be reduced or eliminated via software tuned to the characteristics of a particular lens. Olympus and Panasonic have taken this philosophy and run with it.

The result is a natively poor lens optically that can be made to perform like a better lens due to  the software running behind it. Go to a website that measures raw distortion and look up the specs of some of the lenses offered with current digital cameras. The native distortion is off the charts. I’m talking 6%. Back in the days before software correction, a 6% distortion would be considered a broken lens.

There are two 12mm prime lenses for the Micro 4/3 system: the SLR Magic f/1.6 and the Olympus f/2.0. The SLR Magic has distortion of 1.26% and costs $500. The Olympus has distortion of 5.4% and costs $800. Moreover, the SLR Magic is nearly a full stop brighter. In fairness, the Olympus is sharper and does correct aberrations in-lens, but in the battle of optical quality, the SLR Magic wins. And it’s less expensive. The moral of the story: Olympus thinks its client base are gullible idiots who’ll buy shoddy goods at inflated prices because of the label attached to it. Ironic, because that’s what Leica haters have been accusing Leica of doing for years. Leica does not do this. It may offer you something expensive, but it won’t ever be cheaply made. If someone at Leica ever even floated that idea as a viable business strategy, I suspect he would be forced to commit a Teutonic variation of seppuku.

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leica_m-a_black_frontLeica is not offering you a photographic tool designed as a cheap commodity, replaceable every few years. They’re not asking you to buy into a system thats going to be orphaned in short order. They’re not offering you average optics at inflated prices; they’re offering you exceptional optics at a price point that justifies the venture. And yet, a lot of irrational anger seems directed at Leica, usually by people with only a passing knowledge of its history.

It’s cheap optics at inflated prices that should make you angry. Plastic cameras that fall apart in a year should make you angry (yes, you Sony, with your NEX cameras. My wife has had two; they’re both computerized pieces-of-shit that became non-functional in short order). Abandoned systems should make you angry because the value of a lens is at least partially dependent on how much you can sell it for in the future, and if that lens is for a system that’s obsolete, you’ve now got an expensive paperweight.

So, after all is said and done, I would never buy brand a new Leica digital camera or one of their lenses, mainly because I can’t afford it, or even if I could, other less expensive digital offerings meet whatever needs I require of a digital capture device. When I want to take photographs, I’m happy to totter around with my film Leicas and my vintage lenses. However, don’t get me wrong: I respect Leica and their history, and respect their uncompromising design philosophy, even if it means that I’m priced out if it. They may be expensive, but they are also unique and necessary at a time when cameras have become commodities with a limited shelf life. I applaud Leica for attempting to keep alive whatever vestiges of the old paradigm – where a camera and its lenses were viewed as working tools designed and manufactured with quality and longevity in mind.

How do you put a price on that?

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Do They Actually Sprinkle Magic Dust on Leica Lenses?

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This lens sells for $10,995 

Funny how the perception of a brand changes over time.  Leica became an iconic brand by being the first manufacturer to offer a 35mm system camera. Small and discreet, the perfect carry-around in your pocket camera. Zeiss, which was generally considered to make better optics, came onto the scene only shortly after Leica but produced the unreliable Contax I body (whose design had to jump through hoops to circumvent Leitz patents) as the means to use their excellent optics. As such, Leicas remained the camera of choice for professionals through the 50’s. But there’s more to it than just that. After the war, while the Zeiss factory was carted off to the Soviet Union by victorious eastern bloc troops, Leitz, by virtue of their location in the western bloc, remained to produce cameras. Due to such serendipity, Leitz kept the burgeoning post war photojournalist market to itself until the advent of the Nikon F.

As for the idea that Leitz has always produced the best optics, a quick review of the historical facts on the ground prove otherwise. Already in the 50’s, many working photographers sought out Nikkor optics in preference to what was available from Leitz. During Korea, David Douglas Duncan used a pair of Leica IIIc’s, one with a Nikkor 5cm F1.5 and the other with a Nikkor 13.5cm F4. 

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While a whole generation of gearheads now swear, retroactively, by the traditional superiority of Leitz glass, there was nothing intrinsically superior about Leitz optics through the 50’s, although the Summicron 50mm f2, introduced in 1953 with the M3, is a fine lens, but early versions suffered from the same problems as many other post-war Leitz lenses, namely soft coatings and badly formulated lubricant which caused gassing, haze and mold. The best LTM lenses that you can still find these days tend to be Canon or Nikkor optics built in the 50’s, or, of course, the excellent modern LTM Voigtlander optics produced by Cosina since the late 90’s.

By the 60’s Leitz optics prevailed in the rangefinder market because Leitz was the only manufacturer still committed to building and marketing rangefinder cameras, which, by the mid 60’s had been eclipsed as professional tools by the rise of the SLR in the form of the Nikon F. Most other manufacturers, including Nikon and Canon, were now creating SLR optics, leaving Leitz as the only player in rangefinder optics.

In the 70’s, when I came of age photographically, people were just beginning to perceive Leitz lenses as superior to Zeiss, Nikkor or Canon lenses. But if you compare older examples – the vintage lenses collectors and enthusiasts clammer for today – , for example, 35mm lenses (Biogon versus Elmar) , 50mm (Sonnar versus Summar), or 180/200mm (f2.8 “Olympia” Sonnar versus f4.5 Telyt), it’s hard to understand this, except as an example of the success of subsequent Leitz marketing and retroactive causation. The 50mm Summicron Rigid didn’t hurt either.

 In the 70s Leitz made some fine cameras but also some very bad business decisions; German Leitz would have stopped rangefinder production had it not been for the management at Leica Midland in Canada. Thereafter some of the best Leica M optics (and R) came not from Germany but from Walter Mandler and his team. Mandlar had joined Leitz at Wetzlar in 1946, and, having moved thereafter to Leitz Midland, took advantage of Leitz’s new glass research lab to create some of Leitz’s finest optics.  On Mandler’s retirement the subsequent dismantling of Leitz Canada lens design shifted back to Wetzlar under Wolfgang Vollrath, who crafted improvements to Mandler’s designs. These post Midland lenses are great optics, but they are evolutionary, not revolutionary, dependant upon glass technology advances, well programmed computer optimisation and decreased manufacturing tolerances available to all manufacturers.  

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Of course, current Leica lenses are uniformly excellent, the product of 60 years of developmental know-how since the first Summicron was produced. And, in the last 40 years, Leica has slowly, consciously morphed from a maker of exquisitely hand-crafted mechanical cameras to a producer of exceptional optics, with prices to match. And that’s ultimately the difference between a Leitz optic and a Nikkor or a Canon – the price, and what goes into that price. At the prices they sell their lenses, Leica can afford to make them exceptional. Nikon and Canon and Zeiss and Voigtlander and Ricoh could do the same but choose not to; it’s not as if Leica possesses some esoteric lens making skill that can’t be duplicated elsewhere at the right price point. A case in point is the Nikkor-S 50mm f1.4 offered by Nikon with the Millennium Nikon S3 in 2000. It is the same optical formula as the Olympic Nikkor of 1964, a Double-Gauss 7 elements in 5 groups except now made with modern coatings and the decreased tolerances offered by computerized production. Ultimately assembled by hand, checked and rechecked, it was an element of Nikon’s quixotic statement that it could produce cameras and optics every bit as good as any other manufacturer in the world…and it’s every bit as good as the Leica current Summicron ASPH, regardless of what any hardcore Leicaphile wants to tell you. These days you can buy one on Ebay from Japan, still in the box (with a brand new Millennium S3 attached for good measure), at about a 1/4th of the price of a Leica Summilux ASPH.

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Garry Winogrand and His Leica M4….errr, M3?

imageSo, here’s a picture of Garry Winogrand with his famous M4, you know, the one he ran about 100,000 rolls through and generally beat the hell out of, the camera itself now somewhat of an icon. Except that, as alert Leicaphile Andrew Fishkin points out to me, the shutter advance lever is most definitely not an M4 lever, but rather the old style M2/3 full metal lever. So, given the presence of a dedicated exposure numbering  window next to the shutter release, this would appear to be an M3 as opposed to an M2. Whatever Winogrand was doing with an M3, well, we’ll never know.

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Winogrand’s M4

As for the lens, the more I look at it, it looks like a 21mm Super-Angulon and not the 28mm Elmarit he “always” shot with. So much for “what everybody knows” about Winogrand.

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Famous War Photographer Don McCullin Hates Digital Photography

Lebanon civil war, young Christians with the body of a Palestinian girl, Beirut, Lebanon, 1976

Lebanon civil war, young Christians with the body of a Palestinian girl, Beirut, Lebanon, 1976

Don McCullin doesn’t trust digital photography. Calling it “a totally lying experience”, McCullin, famous photographer of war and disaster, says that the transition to digital capture, editing and storage means viewers could no longer trust the truthfulness of images they see.

One of the 20th century’s greatest war photographers, McCullin covered conflicts in Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, and the Middle East. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including his acclaimed autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour (1990), and 2001’s retrospective Don McCullin. Winner of numerous awards, including two Premier Awards from the World Press Photo, in 1992 he became the only photojournalist to be made Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

Speaking at Photo London in Somerset UK after having been named the Photo London Master of Photography for 2016, McCullin said he did not consider his photograph “art” and did not enjoy it being “sanitized” as is so easily done with digital media. According to McCullin, the inherent truth of photography has been “hijacked” because of the quick and easy nature of digital image making. “I have a dark room and I still process film but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want … the whole thing can’t be trusted.”

Under pressure of time, McCullin does use digital cameras for assigned work, but he remains committed to film, recalling one of his best experiences with film being just this year, standing on Hadrian’s Wall in a blizzard. “If I’d have used a digital camera I would have made that look attractive, but I wanted you to get the feeling that it was cold and lonely,” which it was, he said. For that, a roll of old school Tri-X or HP5 fit the bill perfectly.

McCullin particularly dislikes how digital cameras allow manipulation of color. “These extraordinary pictures in colour, it looks as if someone has tried to redesign a chocolate box,” he said. “In the end, it doesn’t work, it’s hideous.”

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The Leitz Elmarit-C 40mm 2.8. A Leica Lens Not Good Enough For Minolta

imageThe Leitz Elmarit-C 40mm f2.8 is a peculiar lens in the history of Leica optics.  Leitz intended the Elmarit-C to be paired with the Leica CL, itself a joint venture with Minolta that was to produce the compact “Baby M” Leica CL and Leitz Minolta CL, the same camera offered by both companies with differing engravings, between 1973 and 1976. The bodies themselves, be they labelled Leica or Minolta, were to be designed by Leitz and built by Minolta in Japan. Leitz, pulling rank with their reputation as the premium optical manufacturer, were tasked with designing the optics for both the German and Japanese iterations of the camera.

Designed by Leitz, the lenses themselves were to be built by each company to identical spec, either in Germany for the Leica or in Japan for the Leitz Minolta. Leitz designed and proposed the Elmarit-C 40mm 2.8 as the standard lens. Minolta, upon receiving the prototype, came to the awkward conclusion that the lens was a dog, not up to Minolta standards, and requested Leitz to submit a redesign. Leitz reconsidered, recalibrated, and submitted the Summicron-C 40mm f2, a wonderful lens that holds its own to this day.

The barrel design of the Elmarit-C is similar to the Summicron-C 40mm f2 but is shorter in length, making focus and aperture setting even more difficult than it is on the Summicron. To fix this the Elmarit-C 40mm f2.8 featured a tab for both the focusing and aperture ring. The lens also stopped down to f22, unusual for a Leitz designed lens. Aside from that it was pretty much the same lens as the Summicron-C except for its optical quality. The lens is soft close up at any aperture but becomes less noticeable at further distances when stopped down to f5.6 or slower. Contrast is also very low wide open.

The change from the Elmarit to the Summicron happened so late in production that about 400 examples of the slower Elmarit-C f2.8 lens had already been manufactured by Leitz; stuck with them,  Leitz gave them to their employees. Infrequently one will appear on the collectors’ market, a rare and unusual piece of Leica history. That doesn’t mean you should buy one. It is, by all accounts, a terrible lens optically. If you are looking for a compact 40mm M mount lens to use, the standard CL Summicron-C 40mm f2 lens is just fine, as is the faster Voigtlander Nokton 40mm f1.4 for about the same price. The only reason to get the Elmarit-C 40mm f2.8 lens is if you are a collector. It was never offered commercially, making it catnip for Leica collectors as it is obscure, hard to find and no one knows precisely how many exist. Other than wanting it to sit nicely on your display case there is no reason to put it on a camera. Even Minolta agrees.

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The Responsibilities Of Film Photography

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Me and my Dad, 1970.

Call me a contrarian, but I’ve always seen things in a slightly skewed perspective from the average guy. Having lived on both sides of the cultural divide, first blue-collar, and then the recipient of an extended education, I know puffery and outright bullshit when I see it.   I’m much more proud of my state school diploma than I am of my Ivy league degree, feeling I worked a helluva lot harder to earn the former than the latter, see no reason for a Rolex when I can wear my Seiko 5, and much prefer the indigenous culture of Mississippi to the derivative New York City culture where I was raised. Given a choice, I’ll choose a $12 Rebel Yell bourbon over the $150 bottle of Port Charlotte Islay single malt that sits untouched on my sideboard. A Modernist, I find Joyce and Pynchon unreadable when compared to the profound simplicity of Primo Levi.  In short, I’ve seen both sides of the life, and prefer the simple values of the unpretentious to the vanity and prejudices of the fashionable.

I remain a “film guy”.  Lately, I’ve been giving an inordinate amount of consideration as to why that might be. Part of the reason, certainly, is that I’m getting to that age where I’m thinking about what I’ll leave to the next generation.  For me, photography has always been about documentation, capturing life lived both small and large, recording who I am and what I want life to be, and for this, I want something tangible, something I can put in a box that’ll be found and hopefully passed on to posterity. I don’t trust digital 1’s and 0’s to be there to do that, and I suspect we are being sold a bill of goods in our headlong embrace of the virtual future, not really thinking through its ramifications for the transmission of culture across generations.

But maybe it goes a bit beyond that. I’ve come think that there might be something about the practice of film photography that makes it so important for me as well. It takes patience, and that patience is, in a small way, a commitment to the future as much as it is a connection to the past. The craft of photography. Another word we’ve lost sight of.

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My Dad Being a Goofball, 1971.

Photography is and always has been a technologically driven medium. In order to stand out from the pack, photographers seek the unique, and technology usually provides the quickest perceived means to that end. The irony, of course, is that the majority of photographers attempt to differentiate themselves by pursuing the same technological advances, ending up right back where they started — creating work that’s indistinguishable from everybody else attempting to do the same. And so technology cranks the wheel again.

Unfortunately, each new advance in camera technology widens the gap between how a camera operates and how I actually need it to operate. To a modern photographer on the technological treadmill, it seems to me the simplicity of traditional film photography should be liberating: no more straddling the bleeding edge; no more learning and re-learning the latest computer techniques; no more money thrown at the next big trend, only to see it quickly fade into cliché. But it’s a tough sell, usually poo-pooed by digital technocrats as being the death rattles of a dead technology.

For some of us it’s as simple as appreciating the beauty of the mechanical works of art that create our photography. Photographic tools, like the Leica and Nikon RFs of the 50s, can be functional art in themselves.. In them, the tactile aspect is still supreme and there is something to mastering a technology without the neurotic need to constantly upgrade in an elusive search for better results. But of equal or even greater value for many of us is the deliberation required by analogue processes, a deliberation at odds with the requirements of current photographic usage, a mindedness and focus not required, and increasingly becoming lost, in the transition to digital.

Which all helps explain why my shelves are stocked mostly with mid–20th century mechanical film cameras. It’s because no other class of camera has ever satisfied my photographic tendencies, aesthetics and desires nearly as perfectly as the 35mm mechanical rangefinder.

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Le Pure Cafe, rue Jean Mace, Paris

One of the benefits of living in Paris is the food. The best of it is found, not in the latest trendy Michelin-starred haunts of status seekers and haute bourgeois or in tired standbys found in guide books, but in the local cafes you’ll find on virtually every corner of the city. Almost invariably, the meals you’ll find there are inexpensive, simply presented, and incredibly good. Unlike an American meal, where we too often equate quantity of choice with quality, somebody has taken the time and effort to prepare and present one or two dishes simply and elegantly, with the means and in a manner that allows you to savor the experience of enjoying it. One of my favorites is Le Pure Cafe, in the 11th on rue Jean Mace, right around the corner from Le Belle Equipe, where medieval-minded lunatics recently slaughtered 20 people for the sin of enjoying life.

What does this have to do with photography, you ask? To paraphrase Elliott Erwitt, photography should be taken seriously and treated as an avocation, and the analogy to cooking comes to mind: Taking photos digitally and editing them on a computer is like cooking a TV diner in a microwave in your flat. Easy, efficient, fast. if so, then the film process is the simple yet elegant meal, cooked with attention to every step in the process, served to you in Le Pure Cafe. Film process  – how pleasant and elegant it is to use as a craft — is its enduring strength, much the way the Parisian cafe meal can never be compared to a “lunch” at McDonalds.

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My Brother In Law Being a Goofball, 2013

Film photography is now a niche with no aspirations to popular appeal, aimed squarely at discerning users who savor the craftsmanship required of it, while the convenience of digital has made it the tool of choice for those who desire the shortcuts of quick and easy. The act of film photography is the act of tending to an increasingly moribund craft, tied to a set of values, of practices, a kind of thought process that I believe is worth preserving. For me, A traditional all mechanical camera, be it rangefinder or SLR, loaded with a roll of HP5, a 50 or 35 on it, is the most simple and most enjoyable form of photography. Just look at the light, the shapes, the evolving situations, expressions.

With that comes responsibility. Let’s hope we  film aficionados, the people who occupy that niche, are able through our efforts to keep film alive for future generations. Technological change is too often not cumulative but rather a “Faustian bargain” in which something is sacrificed in order for something new to be gained. Will we sacrifice what is of real value in the photographic experience for the new we’ve gained?

 

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Who Are You Trying To Fool?

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by Vaussore de Villeneuve, for Leicaphilia. [Vaussore de Villeneuve is the nom de plume of a working Parisian photojournalist. While it’s a screed, I think an ample dose of irreverence is needed when talking about Leica, so I thought I’d pass it on.]

You, the guy with the latest Leica. Whats with the $8000 camera and $5000 lens? Do you expect people to take you seriously because of what you’ve got hanging around your neck? Newsflash: When I see you stumbling out of the tourist bus with your shiny new Leica, the first thing I think is that you’re compensating for what you know, deep down, is a weak capacity for individual judgment and a compulsive need for approval, because serious working photographers don’t use Leicas anymore, and anyone who actually has a decent understanding of the realities on the ground knows that. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t afford to, the collapse of photojournalism being what it is. Twenty years ago a PJ could make enough money to survive, and maybe even sport an M and a few lenses. Not now. Not even close, especially when a Leica body and a few lenses will cost the equivalent of a year’s PJ wages.

So you are, by definition, a poser, by the very fact that you’re trying to blindly emulate a way  of doing photography that doesn’t exist anymore. The guys who are doing excellent work – the heirs of the greats who often used Leica film cameras – don’t give a damn about the camera they use. And they certainly aren’t impressed by the camera you use to practice your “street photography.” They’re too busy doing hard work in difficult conditions and they’re more than likely using some innocuous camera to do it, maybe even their  iPhone, because they usually live paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t even begin to think about buying the latest Leica even if they wanted to. And whatever they’re using, they’re not carrying it in a designer bag. They can’t afford a designer bag.

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Famous Leica 1

I happen to live in a place where people often equate self-worth with the luxury they can afford. The culture here is predicated on ostentatious displays of wealth, with a constant eye to self-identity through the possession of things. The de rigueur BMW and the Rolex. I hear the stories: people who want giant bookcases, not to display the books they’ve read, but the books they’ll buy by the yard to fill them out. A 30 year old aspiring plutocrat who wants 500 art books, but presently owns none, who wants his guests to think that art is an interest of his. I know an interior designer who designed this huge, specialty bookcase for a guy like this. He asked her to purchase books that would “look good” on the shelf. She went to a site called “Books by the Foot” where you can buy books by color, size, topic, and purchased books for him based on size and color, totally random books that would never be read but whose sole criterion was to look good. She left some of the shelf empty so the guy could fill it with his own books, but he told her to just fill the bookcases out with Books By The Foot. He didn’t own any books.

That bookcase serves as a mask for this man. Its his status marker, a means to impress upon others a certain narrative about himself, his supposed discrimination and refinement. In actuality he can’t define any interests or tastes of his own other than the interest of being thought a certain way by others. And so with you, the new Leica consumer. Your Leica is your mask. And it’s a shame, because Leica used to be a quality camera brand whose cameras were understated, elegant, simple and practical. And some of their digital models still are, although that’s not why you’ve fixated on them now. You buy them as markers of your supposed discrimination and taste. At some point in the last 25 years, people like you hijacked the brand for your own puerile purposes, initiating the transformation of Leica from a photographic tool to a cross between an investment and fashion accessory, a situation that accelerates with each passing year. Its left us traditional Leica users, holding our beat up M3’s and M4’s, cameras that have functioned for us as craftsman’s tools, orphaned and inconsequential to Leica when faced with your tasteless money.

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Do me a favor: stop sullying an iconic brand with your status anxieties. You’ve ruined the pleasure I take in using my well-worn Leica, because now, when I’m out and about with my M4, a camera I’ve used for almost 50 years, one nobody used to pay attention to because they thought it was just an old camera, a camera that was sent back to Leica for rebuild after I dropped it into the Niger while falling out of a sawdagart in Biafra 40 years ago, people now accost me, mouth agape, asking about it. Is that a Leica? Cool! How much does it cost? My uncle is really into photography and has one. Does your’s have The Leica Glow? You know it’s bad when the 17 year old behind the counter at the boulangerie asks if it really takes good pictures like they say.

Really, all you’re doing is showing off to the low hanging fruit, the untutored but well-meaning chaps who will make certain assumptions about you because of the supposedly cool camera you use. The people who know better – well, they know better.  When you’ve bought into a world where products define the people who use them, your identity becomes inseparable from the perception of the goods you use to identify yourself. People will make certain assumptions about you as the user. That cuts both ways, however. What you don’t seem to understand is this: the great unwashed might be impressed, but someone in the know, someone serious about making images, as opposed to the equipment they use to do it, well, what they think when they see you with your $8000 digital Leica with the conspicuous red dot, taking pictures at the book fair, is this: loser.

 

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Three Tough Leicas

imageThree Leicas on display at the Ginza Leica store in Tokyo. From right to left: a Leica II that deflected a bullet and saved the photographer’s life. The middle camera is a Leica II with lenses found in the Hindenburg wreckage. To the left is an SL2 MOT with Motor and 35 mm Summicron that fell 25,000 foot (7600 m) from a Phantom II fighter jet. Battered but in one piece, and deemed repairable by Leica.

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 Actually Using An Old Leica to, You Know, Take Pictures

Leica IIIg LPfoto 1A sublimely beautiful Black Paint Leica IIIg. You can actually take pictures with it

Call me a poseur, or a hipster, but old screw mount Leicas are really fun. Not just setting them on a shelf and admiring them, or walking around the house while fondling their knurled knobs and beautifully machined parts (as I’m known to do), but actually taking them out and shooting film with them, just like they were meant to do. They’re so ‘retro’ that they’re not, and for those with a philosophical bent, this sort of meta-activity (activity meant to comment on the activity itself) can be immensely satisfying, not to mention the pathetic looks you’ll get from the iphone crowd or, better yet, the conspiratorial nods you’ll sometimes receive from a fellow traveller of advanced age. For me, however, the best part is passing paths with somebody sporting a digital Leica with “Swiss Anti-Fingerprint Coating,” often wearing a beret and taking pictures of people in coffee shops in the touristy parts of town, Billingham or Ono bag conspicuous by its immaculate appearance. These folks, when they notice you – and trust me, they’ll notice you, because for all gearheads the act of being out and about with a camera is all about seeing and being seen – often wear a look of morbid fascination, fixation admixed with potential danger,  as if I was carrying a live grenade with the pin removed. I suspect they really want to inquire about it, but don’t quite know what it is or what to make of it, or, if it goes that far, how to use it.

I’m often asked, usually by the iphone crowd, “Does that thing work?” Hell yes it works, because it was built to work seemingly forever, because it’s a sublime fusion of simplicity and function, overbuilt to last for as long as you continue to service it. Keep it in use, and the most you’ll have to do is send it off to a reputable service tech like Youxin Ye every 30 years or so.  I have no doubt that my grandkid’s grandkids, if they were of a mind (and could figure out how to load the thing) could be using it in another 100 years. Try that with your M240, or is it an M260 now?

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Of course, some of the earlier screw mount Leicas – the IA, for example –  are so outdated that even a hopeless romantic like me finds them impractical to use. In 2000, leica offered the an 0-Series replica, fully functional and sold through Leica dealers, to celebrate the 75th birthday of the 35mm Leica camera. The camera is virtually identical to the 1923 Ur-Leica prototype #104 resident in the Leica Museum. No thanks. I like my nostalgia authentic. In my mind, using one of these is like going to Las Vegas and claiming you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower. If I’m going to use a screw mount Leica, I’m going to use the best, most technologically advanced screw mount Leica ever built – the Leica IIIg, not some cheesy historical replica dedicated to the Sultan Of Brunei [on a side note: how is it that Leica culture could be so schizophrenic as to give us both the sublime IIIg, M2/M3 and M4 and also the “Hello Kitty” M6?].For sale-12Released in 1957, the IIIg is Leica’s last screw mount camera. Had it been released in 1950 or 1953, it would be have been far more influential in subsequent Leica lore, because it’s a superb camera that’s really fun to use.   Leitz had introduced the Leica M3 four years earlier in 1953 as a clean sheet design with a new lens mount and the now iconic M styling. The M3 set a new standard for 35mm rangefinders that lasts to this day.

The IIIg was introduced as the logical last evolutionary step of the old Barnack design series, a last tip of the hat to more conservative Leicaphiles who still preferred the familiarity of the Barnack camera. Its new features were incremental – the same basic ergonomics of the IIIf with a redesigned top cover and a larger and improved viewfinder similar to the M3, including an extra frosted window for the projection of different frame lines into the viewfinder.

Leitz produced and offered the IIIg for only 3 years, 1957-60, years when the M3 was meeting with professional  raves and impressive sales. Japanese manufacturers were also offering their updated alternatives to the M3; the IIIg not only had to compete against the better spec’d M3, Canon P and Nikon S3, but after 1958, the Leica M2, itself a runaway success much like the M3. Next to these now iconic cameras, the Leica IIIg was a technological dinosaur, lacking the combined VF/RF assemblies of the M3 and the Canon and Nikon that allowed for a single, much larger eyepiece for simultaneous focusing and composing.

aaaa-08413The author’s incredibly cool Leica IIIg

The Leica IIIg was much like the screw mount Leicas that had been produced by Leitz since the 20’s, featuring only incremental changes from the previous Barnack Leica, the IIIf ‘Red Dial:” A larger .7 mag viewfinder with two sets of illuminated, parallax corrected framelines for the 50/90 focal lengths; Shutter speeds calibrated with a modern shutter speed progression – the 2/4/8/15/30/60…. ; Separate flash synch dial replaced with two flash settings at 1/50 and 1/25th on the shutter speed dial; A film reminder dial placed on the back of the body that exceeded ASA 100.

The IIIg is not as common as earlier Barnacks.   Consequently, they sell for substantially more than a well cared for IIIc or IIIf, and most of them sit on collector’s shelves or circulate among us Leicaphiles in quixotic buy/sell attempts to finally satiate an obsessive compulsion to find The Perfect Leica.

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Above is a photo I took in a Paris street with my IIIg and a first generation collapsible Summicron. The photo isn’t going to win any photojournalism awards, I’m sure, but I really like it just the same. It reminds me of what I love about the city – an eclectic mix of the profane and the sacred, where the beautiful peeks out at you in the most unexpected places.  It also seems appropriate that it was taken with an old Leica, the sort used by HCB for many if his iconic Parisian photos. What’s printed above is a simple scan of the negative with some minor fiddling in Photoshop. But I also have an 10×15 silver print of the same photo, printed by HCB’s own master printer George Fevre, one of my most treasured photographic possessions. How cool is that? My own Parisian “decisive moment,”  captured with an iconic Leica film camera and printed by one of the World’s most masterful printers, the same guy who printed HCB’s stuff. That’s what you call “living the dream.”

 

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Digital “Photography”: Based On A True Story

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Which One Do You Prefer?

“Digital capture quietly but definitively severed the optical connection with reality, that physical relationship between the object photographed and the image that differentiated lens-made imagery and defined our understanding of photography for 160 years. The digital sensor replaced to optical record of light with a computational process that substitutes a calculated reconstruction using only one third of the available photons. That’s right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It’s reality but not as we know it… Veteran digital commentator Kevin Connor says, “The definition of computational photography is still evolving, but I like to think of it as a shift from using a camera as a picture-making device to using it as a data-collecting device.”


I ran across the above quote in an article in Time Magazine entitled “The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming,” which, to put it charitably, is normally not the first place I look when I want cutting edge philosophical discussions, given its pedestrian readership usually located on the far end of any cultural curve. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting article, discussing things some of us, myself included, have been articulating since the inception of the digital age. Just a few years ago, saying essentially the same thing on a popular photo forum, I was roundly derided as a kook by the usual suspects. It’s not as if ignorance and lack of expansive thinking don’t have a consistent pedigree; if history teaches anything, it’s that the revolutionary implications of technological changes are never seen by the average guy until they’re impossible to ignore. Now, if Time is any indication, maybe it’s a message finally resonating with the generally educated public: the passage from  analogue to digital “photography”, from a philosophical and practical perspective, is less an evolution than a revolution of the medium. What we’ve wrought, with our CMOS and CCD sensors that transform light into an insubstantial pattern of 1’s and 0’s, is not merely a difference of degree from traditional photography but rather a fundamental difference of kind. You can even make a claim that digital photography really isn’t ‘photography’ in the etymological sense of the word at all. As Mr. Connor suggests, its more accurately described as “data collecting.”

Until recently, photography worked like this: light reflected off people and things  and would filter through a camera and physically transform a tangible thing, an emulsion of some sort. This emulsion was contained on, or in, some physical substrate, like tin, or glass, or celluloid or plastic. The photograph was a tangible thing, created by light and engraved with a material trace of something that existed in real time and space. That’s how “photography” got its name:  “writing with light”.

Roland Barthes, the French linguist, literary theorist and philosopher, wrote a book about this indexical quality of photography called Camera Lucida. Its one of the seminal texts in the philosophy of photography, which means it’s often referred to while seldom being read, and even less so, understood. To summarize Barthes, what makes a photograph special is its uncanny indexical relationship with what we perceive “out there,” with what’s real. And its indexical nature is closely tied to its analogue processes. Analogue photography transcribes – “writes”-  light as a physical texture on a physical substrate in an indexical relationship of thing to image (i.e. a sign that is linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation irrespective of interpretation). What’s important for Barthes’ purposes is that the analogue photograph was literally an emanation of a referent; from a real body, over there, proceeded radiations which ultimately touched the film in my camera, over here, and a new, physical thing, a tintype, or daguerreotype, or a film negative, was created, physically inscribed by the light that touched it.

Now photography is digital, and the evolution from film to digital is not merely about of the obsolescence of film as the standard photographic medium; rather, it’s the story of a deep ontological and phenomenological shift that is transforming the way we capture and store images that purport to copy the world.  Where we used to have cameras that used light to etch a negative, we now have, in the words of Kevin Connor, digital data-collecting devices that don’t “write with light,” but rather which translate light into discrete number patterns which aren’t indexical and can be instantiated intangibly i.e. what is produced isn’t a ‘thing’ but only a pattern which contains the potential of something else, something else that requires the intercession of of third thing, computation.

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4-1-niepce-view_from_the_windowThe First Photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1827, Le Gras, France

In August, 2003,  I was sitting in the garden outside of Joseph Niépce’s Burgundy estate, where, from the window of which, Niépce had taken history’s first photograph. I was enjoying a pleasant late Summer afternoon in the company of George Fèvre, one of the unsung masters of 20th Century photography. A personal friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, George was the master printer at PICTO in Paris and was the guy who printed HCB’s negatives from the 1950’s until HCB’s death in 2004. If you’ve seen an HCB or Joseph Koudelka print on exhibit somewhere, in all likelihood George printed it.

George was an incredibly nice man, humble to a fault, full of fascinating stories about the foibles of the photographic masters and very thoughtful about the craft of photography.

Cartier-Bresson-negative-HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, Behind the Gare St. Lazare (1932). Picto Labs, Paris. Hands: George Fèvre, Paris 5/11/87 © John Loengard

Up to that day I lived in the old familiar world of traditional photographic practices: aperture and shutter, exposure, film type, developer characteristics, contrast filters and paper grades, a world whose highest achievements George had helped promulgate. What better person to talk to about photography, and what better place to do it, where it all started.

Of course, I wanted to hear his stories, first person accounts of iconic photographers and their iconic prints, and George, always the gentleman, obliged without any sense of the significance of what he was remembering. To him, the specifics of how HCB or Koudelka worked, the quality of their negatives, and how George used them to create the stunning prints that made them famous were nothing special, all in a day’s work for him. What George was interested in talking about was Photoshop, something he had just discovered and of which he was fascinated. And he said something curious to me, something I always remembered and something I stored in memory for a better time to reflect on it.

What George said was this: Photoshop was amazing. Anyone could now do with a few keystrokes what he had laboriously done at such cost in the darkroom. It was going to open up the craft in ways heretofore unimagined. But it was no longer photography. There was something disquieting about the transformation. Photography’s tight bond with reality had been broken, its “indexical” nature, as Barthe would put it, had been severed, and it was this bond that gave photography its power. We were arriving at a post-photographic era, where image capture would become another form of graphic arts, its products cut free from ultimate claims to truth. There could be no claims to truthful reproduction because there was nothing written and no bedrock thing produced, just a numerical patter of 1’s and 0’s instantiated nowhere and capable of endless manipulation. The future would be the era of “visual imaging.”

Since that day,  the cataract of digital innovation has not abated but intensified— we all know the litany because we are caught up in it on every side: 36 mp DSLRs with facial recognition and a bevy of simulations, camera phones, Lyto, Tumblr, Facebook — do I need to go on?

AAAAAAA-6George Fèvre, Le Gras, France, August, 2003

The changes have brought their benefits: giving people the chance at uncensored expression,  allowing us to easily capture and disseminate what we claim to be our experiences. Of course, there are also new problems of craft and aesthetic. Previous technologies have usually expanded technical mastery, but digital technology is contracting it. The eloquence of a single jewel like 5×7 contact print has turned into the un-nuanced vulgarity of 30 x 40 tack sharp Giclee prints taken with fully automated digitized devices and reworked in Photoshop so as destroy any indexical relationship with the real.

We are currently living through a profound cultural transformation at the hands of techno-visionaries with no real investment in photography as a practice. All the more ironic in that this has happened at a time when popular culture now bludgeons us with imagery: while photography is dead, images are everywhere. You see imaging on your way to work, while you’re at work, at lunch time, on your way home from work, when you go out in the evening. Your computerized news feed and email inbox is full of it. Even what you read has become an adjunct to the primacy of the image. The problem is that the images digital processes give us possess no intrinsic proof of their truth, its non-instantiated computated product endlessly malleable and thus cut free from ultimate claims to truth. And it’s this claim to truth that gives photography its uncanny ability to communicate with us, to make us reflect, or to aid us in remembrance, or to help us see anew.

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The Leica M-A

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“Focusing on the founding principles of photography, the Leica M-A (Typ 127) is a 35mm film rangefinder camera characterized by its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. As a completely mechanical camera, no battery is required for operation and the only exposure control offered is a choice of shutter speed, up to 1/1000 sec. A large, bright 0.72x-magnification viewfinder pairs with a precise rangefinder mechanism to enable comparative manual focusing control with M-mount lenses, along with parallax-corrected compositional framing. The body features black-colored chromed brass top and bottom covers, as well as an all-metal body design, to offer both durability as well as an aesthetic, minimal appearance. Designed for intuitiveness and efficient operability, the precision afforded by the M-A serves to complement a straight-forward working method.” – B&H Photo Website

Leica recently released a ‘new’ film camera, the Leica M-A. While it’s ‘new,’ in the sense that it’s just starting to be produced and sold by Leica,  it’s not ‘new’ in the sense that it’s offering any significant improvements on previous Leica M film cameras. From that perspective, it’s a technological step back from Leica’s last ‘new’ M, the electronic M7 introduced 13 years ago. The M-A is “retro” in the best sense of the term, sporting technology unchanged from the 1954 M3.

If Leica wants to keep film photography alive, why don’t they give us a truly ‘new’ film camera, new from the inside out, much like Nikon did with their superlative F6? Leica certainly has the technology, as the current digital M’s do, so, if you are really invested in maintaining yourself as a manufacturer of film cameras,  why not give us an update on the traditional Leica M model, something with more than the standard fully manual, manual focus body with 1/1000s horizontal cloth shutter and 1/50s sync. speed?

The pessimists among us will argue that if the M-A is Leica’s best attempt to keep alive their analogue tradition, then one might take from this that it’s ultimately nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia: the best Leica can do in offering a film camera now is to emulate the past; further progress is no longer an option.

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Optimists will take note that Leica is a camera company that places a premium on tradition. They are the only camera company that attempts to consciously reference their tradition as a selling point. And the fact that Leica is even offering anything new for film photographers is in itself cause for optimism.

For that matter, why screw with a good thing? Some of us believe the mechanical M, ‘dated’ as it may be, remains the pinnacle of film camera design. The current cloth shutter is a marvel of simplicity, quiet, accurate enough, remaining accurate over time and easily repairable by most camera repair techs. It will continue to be repairable even if Leica stops servicing it (unlikely, given they’re still servicing M3’s built 60 years ago). And frankly, you don’t need any shutter speed over 1/1000th, which will effectively freeze even the fastest action. Could Leica have offered us a more technologically advanced shutter, something along the lines of the Hexar RF? Of course, but why? Just maybe they’re smart enough to leave well enough alone.

If it is important to you that your camera of choice be updated every few years, then maybe you aren’t a Leicaphile. Nothing wrong with that. Not all of us want the same thing from our photographic tools. If you want all the bells and whistles in a film body, by all means buy a used F5 on Ebay, an incredibly sophisticated camera that’s ridiculously cheap to buy. However, if you want a ‘new’ Leica, what they’ve been offering since 1954 pretty much represents the terminus of perfected mechanical camera design. When something works as well as a classic M there really is no real need to change it.

 

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Magical Thinking and the Illusion of Continuity

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“With the introduction of a perpetual upgrade program, every LEICA M8 will forever be a state-of-the-art digital camera. Today’s and tomorrow’s users will always be able to incorporate the latest refinements and developments in handling ease and technology. It is our aim to secure your investment in the LEICA M8 for the future. While other digital cameras quickly become outdated and are replaced by newer models, our new concept extends the value retention and resistance to obsolescence embodied in the Leica ethos. Over time, we will gradually offer new product features and developments as upgrade options, declares Steven K. Lee, CEO of Leica Camera AG. Our customers can therefore still invest in the photographic tools they need without worrying that they will miss out on improvements and technological developments along the way.”

 

The above is promotional copy issued by Leica after the introduction of their first digital M, the M8. In retrospect, I’m sure Leica would love to take it back. Now a $6000 M8, introduced only 8 years ago, is considered a technological dinosaur and is worth a fraction of what it cost new. This really isn’t Leica’s fault. In 2008, like everyone else, they suffered from a certain opacity of vision with respect to how the future of digital imaging was going to unfold. I’m sure their intent was good. Rather, what’s happened to the longevity of digital cameras is the consequence of the shortening of product lives and consumer cycles of constant cosmetic updating. This constant fetish for the new, the upgraded, is claimed as progress, but in reality it is simply the result of a producer strategy on the part of the large players in the camera business – Nikon, Sony, Canon – designed to maximize manufacturer profits. The reality, even today, is that the M8 is a very capable camera that produces excellent results basically indistinguishable from the images of the current M which is sold as an exponential advance on previous models. It just isn’t new, and that’s the problem, because there exists no practical incentive for Leica to maintain and service it for any extended period given current realities. The M8, is, in effect, an orphan, through no fault of Leica.

As Erwin Puts has noted, buying a film M was an act of trust built on the assumption of stability. You knew that the camera would be around for decades and repair parts would be available for generations. And you knew that any new Leica M camera would be, at best, an incremental change from the current model. A used M kept its value  because it was a camera locked into an evolutionary cycle of Leica cameras. It was based on a culture and tradition of stability.

The new generation of Leica digital cameras has inevitably succumbed to the mass produced consumer cycle, though, given Leica’s relatively limited resources visavis Japanese manufacturers,  at a pace in the rear of the digital pack.  This creates a double dilemma for Leica – having forsworn stability they are now locked into a consumer cycle game that, given their modest technological means, they can’t have a hope of winning.

Leica can still draw on their experience, but the increase in both innovation and production volume required by new digital realities creates profound problems for traditional handmade Leica culture. In the past Leitz increased production by hiring more people and giving them extensive training. Now the production of digital Leicas requires faster production lines with extensive computer support. But the adjustment of the traditional components of the M series, for example the rangefinder mechanism, still requires a level of precision impossible to achieve, unless, as in the past, a very experienced worker does the job and is given the time needed to do it correctly.

The technology of traditional handmade production relied heavily on the manufacture of components in the Leitz factory itself or on the outsourcing of components to factories that made the parts to Leica specifications based on decades of experience. For any part needed, the responsible manager knew how to assess what was necessary and could anticipate potential problems. This intimate knowledge of the camera’s components is no longer possible in the digital age. Leica has to rely on the experience of external suppliers that deliver the electronic and computerized components that are needed to build a digital Leica M.

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So, the conundrum facing Leica now is this: Is it possible to make a ‘Digital Leica’, a digitized camera that embodies the traditional ethos of the Leica – something small, simple, built to last, enduring? I would argue that the term is an oxymoron, and its been borne out in Leica’s history of digital offerings. Those of us who’ve used both knew immediately that Leica in the digital age, even with the best intentions, is selling us a bill of goods.

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Other than a similarity of form, the differences between a film and digital M are profound. The 35mm Leitz Camera was small. Oskar Barnack, who invented the Leica, was so concerned about maintaining the original diminutive size of the Leica I  he insisted that the rangefinder, added later, be kept as small as possible. The M3 was large compared to the Ur-Leica, but it was still compact by most standards. Digital Ms have incrementally increased in size and weight over the years, bloated in relation to a traditional film M. Its not something we talk about though; the example of the M5 too close at hand. As for simplicity, the current digital M’s are as simple as digital requirements allow them to be, but that doesn’t mean they are simple in the sense of the old Leitz made film cameras. With their nested menus, electronic shutters dependent on Lithium Ion batteries, computerized circuits and digital sensors, they are computers with all the attendant complexities. Enduring? No. Enduring design is not in the nature of digital technology, with the exponential technological increase built into computerized technology by Moore’s Law, which makes it impossible to remain technologically competent over time and thus hold value over the long run.

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The ‘Clean, Lubricate and Adjust’ as a Political Statement

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“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever growing rate.” American Marketing Consultant Victor Lebow, 1955.

Ironic that this quote coincides with the age of the iconic mechanical Leica camera, the M3. The M3, produced by Leitz between 1954 and1966,  is the product of a Leitz corporate culture at odds with the prevalent business ethos; A Leitz culture that valued quality and durability, costly as an initial consumer outlay, no doubt, but prudent when viewed in the context of the product’s productive lifespan, and for Leitz, at the expense of accelerated improvement cycles.

As the marketeer quoted above noted already in 1955, speed of product decay has become a corporate good; durability a hinderance to the cultivation of new consumer appetites. The idea of consumer progress and corporate profits depends on rejecting as valueless what has come before, corporations constantly repudiating what they had only recently proclaimed.

And thus, through advertising, the constant thought shaping of a desire for the newer, the improved, which leads to the consumer’s preoccupation with the next purchase, always chasing future happiness through the a delusive pursuit of something “better.” Of course, this is the big lie that is the necessary premise of the whole philosophy of consumerism. What you desire is always just out of reach, and you will only have what you want with the next purchase.  Anything that is “old,” outdated, last year’s model, is inferior, of no note, no value.  And, like good sheep, consumers that we have been programmed to be, we buy it. Thus, you see talk on any camera forum about 2 year old cameras as being “obsolete” and can observe the neurotic buying and selling amongst the denizens there, chasing the new and improved with the constancy of  a metronome.

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As a general rule, I think that the CLA (“clean, lubricate, adjust”) culture surrounding ownership of mechanical Leicas is crazy. People having their cameras pulled apart and “cleaned and lubricated” every few years is completely unnecessary and, frankly, deeply neurotic. Most Leicas, even shelf queens without much use for long periods of time, will gradually loosen up with use – wind-on will become smoother, lower speeds will free up and become consistent with exercise. Dismantling a camera to deal with these issues invites the potential for as much harm as good. As a general rule, if its not broke, don’t fix it. Of course, if viewfinders are hazy, or rangefinders need alignment or re-silvering, by all means do so.
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That being said, from a philosophical perspective, I applaud the idea of fixing a serviceable tool like a mechanical camera  as opposed to retiring it for something newer. Fixing things, as opposed to upgrading, can be an act of protest,  a thoughtful subversion of the mindless consumerism demanded by an always accelerating economy whose logic insists that the only proper response is to replace what you have with the newer and  “improved,” and, of course, to pay exorbitantly for the privilege of doing so. This, and this only, is what drives profits for camera companies. But keeping things and fixing them is both a a financial remedy and a philosophical stance. Ownership of a finely made tool can be something we see within a larger context, a trust almost.  It can take on a certain moral quality that can deepen the joys of owning something finely made, and made for long use.

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While we as owners benefit from the investment in well-made, purposeful tools, it creates a financial conundrum for manufacturers of quality like Leica. It is, in reality, a corporate ethos at odds with market necessities. And thus we see the necessary gimmicks Leica employs to stay solvent, because a 50 year old M4, a tool manufactured and sold by them generations ago, properly maintained, is as functional today as the day it was produced. In almost all respects, it is the better of the cameras being produced today by Leica, even those, like the MP, which presume to maintain the leica’s mechanical heritage, given that they have been incrementally dumbed down in the course of modern updating and reduced quality components. Why buy a $4500 MP when you can buy a beautiful, fully functional M4 for a fifth of the price?

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1976: The Year Art Photography Changed

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Prior to 1976 ‘serious’ photographers shot black and white. William Eggleston changed that. On the 25th May 1976, courtesy of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the accompanying book, ‘William Eggleston’s Guide’, color photography arrived as a serious photographic medium. The subject is a rather laconic view of fly-over America, subject and era lending itself perfectly to the Kodachrome aesthetic. Eggleston had pioneered the photographic trope of the banal as interesting, the ordinary as revelatory. While this idea, played out as it has subsequently been, now might seem trite, it was revolutionary in 1976.

The MMA reprinted the book in facsimile in 2002 along with an essay from photography critic John Szarkowski.

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Eggleston is a Leica gearhead. He owns over 300 leicas. This is a picture of a a handbuilt case he uses to store and transport some of them. This particular case holds 13 different Leica cameras and a couple of old Canon rangefinders for good measure. The case itself is a leather briefcase that Eggleston retrofitted with wood panels.

Eggleston is particular about the earlier Leica thread mount bodies. In addition to standard issue models, his collection includes rare limited-edition and custom-painted bodies. He claims he uses all of them. Eggleston admits his gear fixation “has grown into something of an obsession.”

Ironically, the photograph above was shot by Eggleston using a Fuji X-Pro1.

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Leica In the Nazi Era

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By the 1930s the family-owned firm of Leitz, Inc., was internationally recognized as a premier German brand.  During the Nazi period, and throughout WW2, Leitz produced cameras, range-finders, and other optical systems for the Nazis. The Nazi government needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz’s single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.  It’s an inconvenient historical fact that might make many, even today, uneasy about patronizing Leica, Leitz’s corporate legacy.

As with much complicity during the Nazi era, the realities can be nuanced, making moral generalizations difficult. Certainly this is the case with Leitz family and its covert efforts to support and save German Jews. Like many German industrialists during the Nazi era, Leitz family patriarch Ernst Leitz II joined the Nazi Party and remained a member throughout the 1930s.  Recently however, historians have claimed that the Leitz family and Leitz as a company took an active role in quietly subverting Nazi harassment of German Jews, and many of these claims detail heroic efforts in behalf of German Jews by the Leitz family and the corporate edifice of Leitz, Inc. “The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train,” by Frank Dabba Smith, details the various ways the Leitz family and corporation acted in attempting to save its Jewish associates.

Upon Hitler’s ascension to power and the implementation of the Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities, Ernst Leitz II began helping Jewish employees, acquaintances and families leave Germany.  Leitz established what has become known as “the Leica Freedom Train”, allowing Jews to leave Germany in their role as Leitz “employees” assigned overseas.  Employees, retailers, family members, friends of family members were “assigned” to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, and the United States.  After Kristallnacht in November, 1938, these overseas assignments intensified. Jewish “employees” and families would be sent by sea to New York, where executives in Leitz’s Manhattan offices helped them resettle and found them jobs in the New York photo industry.  Many new arrivals were given a Leica camera and paid a stipend by Leitz until they could find work. This “Leitz Freedom Train” reached its greatest urgency in 1938 and 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York on a regular basis. At the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, when German borders were closed, hundreds of Leitz Jews had escaped to America with the covert assistance of the Leitz family and Leitz Inc. Out of this humanitarian migration came many designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers for the American photo industry and writers for the American photographic press.

Leitz’s actions in behalf of German Jews were not without consequences for the Leitz family and company management. The Nazis jailed Leitz executive Alfred Turk for friendliness toward Jews and freed him only after a large cash payment to the Reich. The Gestapo imprisoned Ernest Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, after they caught her helping Jewish employees cross into Switzerland. She had initially fallen under suspicion when she had attempted to improve the living conditions of 800 Ukrainian slave laborers who had been assigned by the Nazis to work in theLeitz’s Wetzlar production plant. After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officer d’honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.

Why are Leitz’s honorable actions during WW2 not more widely known? According to writer Norman Lipton, the Leitz family desired no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the family was dead did the “Leica Freedom Train” finally come to light.

 

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