Category Archives: Famous Leica Users

Missing That Iconic Shot While Loading Your Leica

David Burnett, Washington Post, June 12, 2012:

It’s difficult to explain to someone who has grown up in the world of digital photography just what it was like being a photojournalist in the all-too-recently-passed era of film cameras. That there was, necessarily, a moment when your finite roll of film would end at frame 36, and you would have to swap out the shot film for a fresh roll before being able to resume the hunt for a picture. In those “in between” moments, brief as they might have been, there was always the possibility of the picture taking place. You would try to anticipate what was happening in front of your eyes, and avoid being out of film at some key intersection of time and place. But sometimes the moment just wouldn’t wait. Photojournalism — the pursuit of storytelling with a camera — is still a relatively young trade, but there are plenty of stories about those missed pictures.

In the summer of 1972, I was a 25-year-old photojournalist working in Vietnam, mostly for Time and Life magazines. As the United States began winding down its direct combat role and encouraging Vietnamese fighting units to take over the war, trying to find and tell the story presented enormous challenges. On June 8, a New York Times reporter and I were going to explore what was happening on Route 1, an hour out of Saigon. We visited a small village that had seen some overnight fighting, but were told by locals that there was a bigger battle going on a few kilometers north. There, at the village of Trang Bang, I waited and watched with a dozen other journalists from a short distance as round after round of small-arm and grenade fire signaled an ongoing firefight. I was changing film in one of my old Leicas, an amazing camera with a reputation for being infamously difficult to load. As I struggled, a Vietnamese air force fighter came in low and slow and dropped napalm on what its pilot thought were enemy positions. Moments later, as I was still fumbling with my camera, the journalists were riveted by faint images of people running through the smoke. AP photographer Nick Ut took off toward the villagers who were running in desperation from the fire.

In one moment, when Ut’s Leica came up to his eye and he took a photograph of the badly burned children, he captured an image that would transcend politics and history and become emblematic of the horrors of war visited on the innocent. When a photograph is just right, it captures all those elements of time and emotion in an indelible way. Film and video treat every moment equally, yet those moments simply are not equal.Within minutes, the children had been hustled into Nick’s car and were en route to a Saigon hospital. A couple of hours later, I found myself at the Associated Press darkroom, waiting to see what my own pictures looked like. Then, out from the darkroom stepped Nick Ut, holding a small, still-wet copy of his best picture: a 5-by-7 print of Kim Phuc running with her brothers to escape the burning napalm. We were the first eyes to see that picture; it would be another full day before the rest of the world would see it on virtually every newspaper’s Page 1.

When I reflect on that day, my clearest memory is the sight, out of the corner of my eye, of Nick and another reporter beginning their run toward the oncoming children. It took another 20 or 30 seconds for me to finish loading my stubborn Leica, and I then joined them. It was real life, unfolding at the pace of life.For some years afterward, I wondered what had happened to Kim Phuc. She eventually left Vietnam for Cuba, and later, on a stopover in Canada, defected with her husband. They now live near Toronto, where she runs a foundation dedicated to helping children deal with the trauma of war. Nick Ut is still photographing for AP in Los Angeles.I think often of that day, and of the unlikelihood of a picture from such a relatively minor military operation becoming one of the most iconic pictures from the entire war — or any war. For those of us who carry our cameras along the sidewalk of history for a living, it is comforting to know that even in today’s digitally overloaded world, a single photograph, whether our own or someone else’s, can still tell a story that rises above language, locale and time itself.Except for one photo, which was published in Life the next week, my own pictures have lived in my archives for 40 years, like witnesses in waiting — until now.

***

After Trang Bang, my sense of being “photographer ready” was more acute; the instinct has served me well in dozens of stories since. You never really know what is going to happen next. Anticipating what could happen, what might happen, those are the keys to being a great photographer.

And yet, even with those lessons uppermost in my mind, there were times when I simply didn’t anticipate what might happen.

In March 1979, having just returned days before from covering the Revolution in Iran, I found myself in a key “pool” position at the White House North Lawn. It was the official signing of the Camp David peace accords, negotiated by President Carter, between Egypt and Israel. It was a historic day, with plenty of television and photo coverage. I was carrying my own three cameras, plus one each from two other photographers, as I was given a good spot, head-on, from which to see the three dignitaries: Carter, Begin and Sadat. Once they walked onto the outdoor stage, I began shooting. I shot madly as they signed the documents and passed the papers among themselves. And at the magic moment, after they had all put down their pens, they stood up and unexpectedly embraced, hand over hand, all round, with gusts of wind fluttering the three giant flags behind them. This was the picture. As I grabbed for one of my cameras, I realized the roll was completely shot. I grabbed the next camera: same result. And then the third, fourth and last cameras. Panic. I was out of film in all five cameras, and even with motorized loading was still at least 25 or 30 seconds away from being able to make a picture.

There were no more groundbreaking handshakes. No more diplomatic embraces. It was over, and I had no pictures of that day that, to me, spoke to the event itself.

In the new digital age of 1,000-plus pictures on a memory card, running out of “film” is less likely. But being aware is still what photography is about. Being able to see that bigger world and your place in it. And knowing that, at any time, a picture could take place. So, today, I try to always have a few frames of film left, and plenty of space on my memory card. Always.

Nick Ut’s Recollections of Trang Bang

Nick Ut, 1966, Viet Nam

In year 7 of the war, I heard the story about heavy fighting in Trang Bang. Lots of people were fighting on highway one and they had locked down the highway. They were fighting like they were on the first day. So I told a friend of mine that I wanted to go there the next day in the early morning. At 7:30 the following morning I saw 1,000 victim refugees on the highway, many of them running. I took a lot of pictures of refugees running, and you could see the black smoke from the bombs all morning. I followed the 25th division away from the highway 2 miles away. When I went back to the highway I saw dead bodies everywhere. So I wanted to head back to AP Saigon because I had many pictures ready. That was when I noticed one Vietnamese soldier. He had thrown a smoke grenade, which erupted in yellow smoke. Then you could hear a jet come in and dive down and drop two bombs. Immediately there were two explosions. It was very noisy. And then a sky-rider dove and dropped napalm. And I shot the picture and it looked really good because I shot in black and white, not color. I took the picture and then everyone was running furiously; I had taken the picture before anyone had realized what happened. Then a woman carrying a baby came running. She is asking for help. Her grandson was dying and he was only a year old. I used my Leica to take a picture and the boy died right in front of my camera. Then I saw the naked girl, Kim, running and I ran inside right away. I took a lot of pictures. And when she passed me I saw a lot of her skin coming off. I knew she was going to die. I put my camera down on the highway and put water on her body right away. She told me no more water. I told her it was just drinking water. But she said in Vietnamese, “Too hot! Too hot! I think I’m dying”

She told her brother she thought she was dying also. But they kept running for another ten minutes and then I told her I wanted to help her. My friend from the BBC assisted with the water bottle. Then I borrowed a raincoat for her body since she was naked. I picked her up and put her in my car with all the children already inside the car. She kept telling me she was dying. I knew she was dying, but I wanted to take her to a good hospital. And the people at the hospital wanted to help her too. But the local hospital was too small. When I got there I showed them my media pass and said if these children die your picture will be on the front page tomorrow and you might be out of a job, and they were worried. Well, we got all the children into the hospital, but then I started worrying about my pictures. I held my camera and looked at it to see how many frames I had taken. I knew that number 7 would be a good shot. When I got to the AP office I told them I had a very important roll of film. I asked them to please help me develop it, so we went into the darkroom immediately. We developed all my pictures and after looking at the first photo they asked me why I shot a picture of a naked girl. I said no, it was the result of a napalm bomb. You can see it exploding. We made one 5 x7 print of it and waited for Horst to come back so we could show him the picture. I wound up talking all week about that picture. New York and Vietnam said good job. And that morning Horst and I went back to do a story about what had happened with the napalm. Later we saw Kim’s father running around looking for her. I told him she might be dying in a hospital. He screamed and then he took a small car to the hospital right away. I went back to the hospital and I saw her parents. Her father thanked me and said I saved his daughter’s life.

William Eggleston Mails It In From Paris

I’ve been lucky enough to have lived in Paris. It was one of the formative experiences of my life. I spent countless hours walking the streets with a camera, looking, not always successfully, for interesting ways to visually capture my impressions of the city while avoiding the standard photographic cliches.

Paris is not an easy city to photograph. Its surface charms easily lend themselves to cliche. Certainly, Paris has its quick and easy visual charms, but Atget, Lartigue, Brassai, Ronis, Cartier-Bresson, Boubot, Koudelka and many more have seemingly exhausted a picturesque presentation of Paris. The last thing the world needs is another photographer recycling the same tired Parisian visual tropes.

So I was mildly surprised when, visiting Paris last Fall, I found a monograph of William Eggleston’s photographs of Paris on my Parisian friend’s bookshelf. “Never heard of it, ” I mentioned to my friend Jorge as I pulled it from its place on the shelf and opened it. “Its junk, the sort of crap you get to publish because you’re famous,” Jorge replied.

William Eggleston Paris is the result of an invitation from the Foundation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris to Eggleston to photograph the city and exhibit the results at the Foundation. In their notes advertising the finished project, they claim Eggleston spent three years working on the project. If you read the end notes carefully, you’ll discover he actually spent only a few weekends in Paris photographing. It shows. The work has all the superficiality of a bus tourist’s idealized idea of “The City of Light.” Give any aesthetically interested teenager an iPhone with an Instagram app and a few long weekends in Paris and they’d crank the same photos out endlessly. The difference, them not being William Eggleston, nobody would give them prime space in Paris to exhibit it, let alone publish and promote it internationally.

Some photographers’ excellence is inextricably bound to a time and place: Atget’s and Brassai’s Paris, Winogrand’s New York City, Harvey Stein’s Coney Island, Paul Kwilecki’s small town Georgia. Memphis born Eggleston’s appeal has always been his use of color to present his laconic vision of American fly-over territory – the banalities of capitalist consumer culture. His “genius”, if we can call it that, was to see the role color played in the States in a way it doesn’t elsewhere, its vulgarity and ugliness when co-opted to sell things or to brighten lives made dull by the false promise of American consumerism. Speaking of his discovery of color, Eggleston remembered the day he “got it”: he decided one day to go to a large Memphis supermarket and take pictures of the shoppers, so American. He unwittingly overexposed the day’s film, and when he had them developed he saw the hidden meaning of the color pop out at him: “the first frame, I remember, was some kid pushing grocery carts. Some kind of pimply, freckle faced guy in the late sunlight.” Perfect.

As for the Paris pictures, its hard to fault Eggleston for their failure. Knowing his dry humor, I half suspect he considered himself in on the joke. The fault really lies with the person whose idea it was commission the project. What could Eggleston’s aesthetic, so tied to its American context for its effect, have to say about a city and culture he could only know as a tourist? Expecting Eggleston to have a coherent, mature vision of Paris, simply because he’s William Eggleston, is wooly headed at best.

Eggleston’s failed Parisian adventure should remind us of the vital importance of context to good photography. The best, Eggleston’s included, is the result of an idiosyncratic vision, often tied to a specific time or place, the time or place usually being an integral component of the idiosyncrasy. Subtract the time, or the place, and the vision it spawns, and you are left with mere photographs. Anybody with an iPhone can take a photograph.

And that’s ultimately what makes photography such a simple yet deceptively difficult aesthetic undertaking. It seems so easy: buy a good camera with a good lens and find interesting things to photograph; make sure the pictures are sharp, the colors are vivid, the appropriate things are in focus, and the visual elements interestingly arranged. Post your best work on Tumblr. You may get an exhibition of your work at the local cafe. The only problem is you’ll still have nothing to say, and you’ll never, in 50 years of shooting pictures, produce one picture like the one below, because you didn’t have the vision to look for it and you wouldn’t have recognized it if you saw it:

In my time in Paris, my friend Jorge and I made a habit to see as much work in exhibitions and galleries as we could. Most of it, even the wildly celebrated, frankly wasn’t very good. Some of it, like Antoine D’Agata’s work at VU gallery, was magnificent, instantly recognizable as quality stuff. After years of looking, we jokingly encapsulated what we learned in a few simple rules. Rule 1: Have something to say. Rule 2: If you don’t have anything to say, make your prints really big. Rule 3: If that doesn’t work, make your photos really colorful. Eggleston’s Paris photos follow all three Rules.

In Eggleston’s best work, the work that made him famous, color is intrinsic to the meaning of the photograph. Its not simply a garnish to draw the eye. His best photographs are not ‘about’ the color; they are about larger issues that the color is used in the service of. This is whats missing in his Paris pictures. The color here is pure ornament, eye candy to seduce you into forgetting that the picture has nothing to say.

Robert Frank Gets Arrested Down South

In November 1955, Lt RE Brown of the Arkansas State Police spotted an unshaven and shabbily dressed suspicious looking man driving an old Ford near the Mississippi River.The man’s car was full of maps, numerous papers written in foreign languages, and a number of strange German “Leica’ cameras with bags and bags of exposed films. Suspecting the man to be a communist spy, Lt Brown arrested Robert Frank and brought him to the McGehee City jail for fingerprinting and interrogation. A local citizen “who knew several foreign languages” was brought in to assist in Frank’s questioning even though Frank spoke fluent English.

The Swiss-born Frank protested that he was a professional photographer who had received a grant to travel America taking pictures. He explained that his work had been published in the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times and Life and Look magazines. Frank showed the Lt. some of his work, what looked to Lt. Brown like spy photos: blurry images, often out of car windows, of things like bridges, factories and power stations. It was only when Frank produced a well worn copy of Forbes magazine with his name and photos prominently displayed was he finally allowed to go on his way. His fingerprints were forwarded to the FBI.

Four years later, in 1959, some of the same pictures he showed Lt Brown would be published in book form in Frank’s seminal work The Americans.

ARKANSAS STATE POLICE
Little Rock, Arkansas

December 19, 1955

Alan R. Templeton, Captain
Criminal Investigations Division
Arkansas State Police
Little Rock, Arkansas

Dear Captain Templeton:

On or about November 7, I was enroute to Dermott to attend to some business and about 2 o’clock I observed a 1950 or 1951 Ford with New York license, driven by a subject later identified as Robert Frank of New York City.

After stopping the car I noticed that he was shabbily dressed, needed a shave and a haircut, also a bath. Subject talked with a foreign accent. I talked to the subject a few minutes and looked into the car where I noticed it was heavily loaded with suitcases, trunks and a number of cameras.

Due to the fact that it was necessary for me to report to Dermott immediately, I placed the subject in the City Jail in McGehee until such time that I could return and check him out.

After returning from Dermott I questioned this subject. He was very uncooperative and had a tendency to be “smart-elecky” in answering questions. Present during the questioning was Trooper Buren Jackson and Officer Ernest Crook of the McGehee Police Department.

We were advised that a Mr. Mercer Woolf of McGehee, who had some experience in counter-intelligence work during World War II and could read and speak several foreign languages, would be available to assist us in checking out this subject. Subject had numerous papers in foreign langauges, including a passport that did not include his picture.

This officer investigated this subject due to the man’s appearance, the fact that he was a foreigner and had in his possession cameras and felt that the subject should be checked out as we are continually being advised to watch out for any persons illegally in this country possibly in the emply of some unfriendly foreign power and the possibility of Communist affiliations.

Subject was fingerprinted in the normal routine of police investigation; one card being sent to Arkansas State Police Headquarters and one card to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.

Respectfully submitted,
Lieutenant R.E. Brown, Lieutenant Comanding
Troop #5
ARKANSAS STATE POLICE
Warren, Arkansas

Allen Ginsberg’s Leica Selfie

I didn’t know much of Allen Ginsberg before reading Bill Morgan’s excellent 2008 biography I Celebrate Myself. Ginsberg seemed at best a minor talent in a discipline I knew little about, at worst a mentally ill crank. But Morgan’s book drew me in deeper and deeper, and I soon saw the genius of Ginsberg, a genius manifested in both his art and his life, which I assume Ginsberg would say were one and the same. Ginsberg’s humanity shines through in Morgan’s work – generosity, kindness, creativity, eccentricity, but mostly a dedication to live fully and richly without excuse. In this age of greedy hucksters passing as ‘artists’, Ginsberg was the real deal. A fascinating human being in the best sense of the word.

So I was particularly interested when The National Gallery of Art published Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg. From the late 40’s through the early 60’s, Ginsberg made many photographs of his Beat friends – Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso – and did so with a great photographic eye and an uncanny sense of the importance of everyday events, what he referred to as “certain moments in eternity.” The photographs were meant for his private use, “keepsakes” with no further value than as personal documents of private moments.

Apparently Ginsberg put down his camera in 1963 and didn’t routinely pick it up again til the 1980’s, when, with the help of his friend Robert Frank, he edited and printed a series for exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York. Adding extensive handwritten inscription on each exhibition print, the series is quotidian documentary photography at its best – immediate, warm, human, casual, funny, sad – and always visually arresting in its lack of artifice.

Ginsberg, ever humble, questioned the importance of his photographs and deferred questions about this aspect of his creativity by agreeing with Robert Frank’s assertion that “photography was an art for lazy people.” And it can be. But the best photography, work like Ginsberg’s, transcends the simplicity of its making and gives us something new to see, something that is more than the sum of what it represents.

“Leica Photography” Is Dead. Leica Killed It.

Above are two of my favorite photographs from two of the twentieth century’s most skilled and creative photographers. Both are powerfully evocative while being deceptively banal, commonplace. A dog in a park; a couple with their child at the beach. Both were taken with simple Leica 35mm film cameras and epitomize the traditional Leica aesthetic: quick glimpses of lived life taken with a small, discrete camera, what’s come to be known rather tritely as the “Decisive Moment.”

Looking at them I’m reminded that a definition of photographic “quality” is meaningless unless we can define what make photographs evocative. In the digital age, with an enormous emphasis on detail and precision, most people use resolution as their only standard. Bewitched by technology, digital photographers have fetishized sharpness and detail.

Before digital, a photographer would choose a film format and film that fit the constraints of necessity. Photographers used Leica rangefinders because they were small, and light and offered a full system of lenses and accessories. Leitz optics were no better than its competitor Zeiss, and often not as good as the upstart Nikkor optics discovered by photojournalists during the Korean War. The old 50/2 Leitz Summars and Summitars were markedly inferior to the Zeiss Jena 50/1.5 or the 50/2 Nikkor. The 85/2 and 105/2.5 Nikkors were much better than the 90/2 first version Summicron; the Leitz 50/1.5 Summarit, a coated version of the prewar Xenon, was less sharp than the Nikkor 50/1.4 and the Nikkor’s design predecessor the Zeiss 50/1.5. The W-Nikkor 3.5cm 1.8 blew the 35mm Leitz offerings out of the water, and the LTM version remains, 60 years later, one of the best 35mm lenses ever made for a Leica.

But the point is this: back when HCB and Robert Frank carried a Leica rangefinder, nobody much cared if a 35mm negative was grainy or tack sharp. If it was good enough it made the cover of Life or Look Magazine. The average newspaper photo, rarely larger than 4×5, was printed by letterpress using a relatively coarse halftone screen on pulp paper, certainly not a situation requiring a super sharp lens. As for prints, HCB left the developing and printing to others, masters like my friend and mentor Georges Fèvre of PICTO/Paris, who could magically turn a mediocre negative into a stunning print in the darkroom.

50’s era films were grainy, another reason not to shoot a small negative. Enthusiasts used a 6×6 TLR if they needed 11×14 or larger prints. For a commercial product shot for a magazine spread the choice might be 6×6, 6×7, or 6×9. Many didn’t shoot less than 4×5. If you wanted as much detail as possible, then you would shoot sheet film: 4×5, 5×7 or 8×10.

What made the ‘Leica mystique’, the reason why people like Jacques Lartigue, Robert Capa, HCB, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank and Andre Kertesz used a Leica, was because it was the smallest, lightest, best built and most functional 35mm camera system then available. It wasn’t about the lenses. Many, including Robert Frank, used Zeiss, Nikkor or Canon lenses on their Leicas. It was only in the 1990’s, with the ownership change from the Leitz family to Leica GmbH, that Leica reinvented itself as a premier optical manufacturer. The traditional rangefinder business came along for the ride, but Leica technology became focused on optical design. Today, by all accounts, Leica makes the finest photographic optics in the world, with prices to match.

Which leads me to note the confused and contradictory soap boxes current digital Leicaphiles too often find themselves standing on. Invariably, they drone on about the uncompromising standards of the optics, while simultaneously dumbing down their files post-production to give the look of a vintage Summarit and Tri-X pushed to 1600 iso. Leica themselves seem to have fallen for the confusion as well. They’ve marketed the MM (Monochrom) as an unsurpassed tool to produce the subtle tonal gradations of the best B&W, but then bundle it with Silver Efex Pro software to encourage users to recreate the grainy, contrasty look of 35mm Tri-X. The current Leica – Leica GmbH – seems content to trade on Leica’s heritage while having turned its back on what made Leica famous: simplicity and ease of use. Instead, they now cynically produce and market status.

For the greats who made Leica’s name – HCB, Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka – it had nothing to do with status. It was all about an eye, and a camera discreet enough to service it. They were there, with a camera that allowed them access, and they had the vision to take that shot, at that time, and to subsequently find it in a contact sheet. That was “Leica Photography.” It wasn’t about sharpness or resolution, or aspherical elements, or creamy bokeh or chromatic aberration or back focus or all the other nonsense we feel necessary to value when we fail to acknowledge the poverty of our vision.

Leica Selfie #21

Robert Frank, Paris 1999

Garry Winogrand’s M4

Born in 1928 and died in 1984, Winogrand is considered by many to be one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century. By the early 1970’s when he purchased this M4, he was shooting roughly 1000 rolls of film a year, a pace he accelerated until his death from cancer in 1984.

While Winogrand is known for his wide angle vision (many of his iconic photos were taken with a 28mm Elmarit) he typically carried two camera bodies with him, one with a 28 and one with a moderate telephoto. This particular M4 was produced in Wetzler in November, 1970, which means it probably saw 12 years and approximately 15,000 rolls of concentrated use by Winogrand.

According to Stephen Gandy, this M4 passed to one of Winogrand’s friends, who still uses the camera. I’m pretty certain Winogrand would have wanted it that way.

Robert Frank and the Leica Legacy

Would Robert Frank be using the latest digital Leica M if he were working today? Who knows, although I doubt it. He probably couldn’t afford one, certainly if he were unemployed and making ends meet on a Guggenheim fellowship. I suspect, were he travelling the States with Mrs. Frank today, updating his classic The Americans, he’d be driving a used Hyundai and shooting a digital point and shoot he bought second hand on Ebay. Or maybe, just maybe, he’d be using a beater M and shooting Arista Premium 400 he bought bulk from Freestyle.

Frank wasn’t much concerned about his equipment. He had started out using a Rolleiflex TLR but had switched to a Leica IIIc because it was small and unobtrusive and better suited to his documentary aesthetic. Its 50mm Sonnar was seriously out of whack, offset sufficiently from the film plane that it was exposing the sides of the image around the film’s sprocket holes.

This is not to accuse Leica of being cynical or disingenuous with its ad campaign for the latest M digital. Frank did use a Leica for some of the iconic photos of the twentieth century, and he continued to use them through the 1980’s, after which he dropped out of site photographically. (I recall seeing him in NYC in that era, sitting with 2 Leica M’s on a table next to him.) They’ve earned the right to claim Frank’s loyalty.

Frank was a visual purist. It was only the image that mattered. And I don’t mean that in the sense of what digital photographers mean by ‘image quality.’ He couldn’t care less about sharpness and resolution and bokeh and all the other foolish things current photographers mistake for quality. His best images are remarkably free of such pedestrian concerns. It was always about whether the image spoke to you.

Leicas have always been expensive. They’ve always prided themselves on the quality of their optics. But there’s been a sea-change in the public’s perception of what is unique to a Leica rangefinder since the advent of the digital M. Traditionally, Leicas were prized by Frank’s generation because they were small, and quiet and discreet. Their Summicrons and Elmars and Elmarits were excellent lenses, well-made and optically sound, but they weren’t that much better than the 50’s and 60’s era offerings from Zeiss and Nikon. (Many of the iconic Americans photographs were taken with a Zeiss Sonnar.) What mattered was seeing the picture and getting the picture, needs that a small pocket-size camera that could scale focus met well.

Now Leica stands for exclusivity and unparalleled, over the top optical excellence. Nothing wrong with that. But it wasn’t why Robert Frank used a Leica, and it wouldn’t be today if he were still photographing.

Robert Frank, 2009

Leicaphilia

Philia (/ˈfɪljə/ or /ˈfɪliə/) is one of the four ancient Greek words for love.