Weight: 9 ounces (255 grams) Filter Thread: 40.5mm Extension from Camera Body at Infinity Focus: 1.62″ (41mm) Elements: Six elements in Four Groups Minimum Aperture: F16, click stops
The Leica thread mount Topcor 5cm f/2 is considered one of the best normal M39 lenses of the pre-Summicron era. Some even claim it a match for the Summicrons of the 60s and 70s, at F5.6 and beyond on a par with the most recent versions of the Summicron. (It’s funny how much better Leitz optics are claimed to be unless of course, you’re selling a non-Leitz-made LTM, all of which apparently are “as good or better” than the Leitz version. I fall in with the “as good or better” crowd, finding the ’50s era Nikkors and Serenars typically more robust than that era’s Leitz’s and thus usually in better optical condition today).
Tōkyō Kōgaku Kikai K.K. (Tokyo Optical Company, Ltd.) was established in Tokyo in 1932 and started making lenses in 1935. Initially producing larger format lenses and lenses for the Japanese military, the company made LTM lenses after the War. These LTM lenses were first branded “State”, then “Simlar”, “C.Simlar” before “Topcor”. Topcor optics were considered fine optics back then. Topcon lenses were sharp, indicating a high degree of optical design skill, and build quality was good, on par with ’50s era LTM lenses from Japan and Germany. Mechanically it compared to the LTM Nikkor-s 5cm f2 and to Canon LTM lenses. My early production chrome “Topcor 5cm f/2” (no “s”) came attached to a 1956 Leotax F and has the look and feel of a typical ’50s era fast prime. It’s beautifully machined heavy chrome.
A 1956 Leotax K With the Chrome Topcor 5cm f2
The Topcor 5cm f/2 was sold with the Leotax series of rangefinder cameras from 1956 through 1961, available on the F, T, K, FV, TV2, and T 2L models. They don’t appear to have been sold separately from the Leotax. Early models were chrome, later models black: in 1956 the chrome Topcor f/2 5 cm lens appeared, replaced by the new chrome Topcor-S f/2 in 1957 and updated to the black and chrome panda version in 1958. A black aluminum barrel version was released in 1958. When the Leotax G arrived in 1961, its lens offering was a black Topcor-S 5cm f/1.8. (This new Topcor-S f/1.8 looks similar to the aluminum-bodied f/2, including the 6 elements in 4 groups optical design, 10 aperture blades and 40.5 mm filter thread, but the front elements are noticeably different). All versions of the f/2 feature an optical design of 6 elements in 4 groups, 10 aperture blades.
It’s unclear how many 5cm F2 Topcors were made. It’s uncommon to find them these days. Although maybe 25,000 Leotax’s were produced between 56 and 61, I assume many were purchased with the slower speed Topcor 5cm f3.5, a few more with the expensive 5cm 1.5 ( the 1955 brochure for the F’s introduction lists the 1.5 and the 3.5 5cm as the standard lens options). Undoubtedly many more have disappeared over the years, stuffed in old boxes in attics or simply thrown out as junk. Both the chrome and black Topcor 5cm F2 appear for sale on eBay from time-to-time, usually stuck to a Leotax body at relatively cheap prices. Sold separately, they command a premium price. Makes no sense, but then again, nothing about vintage rangefinder pricing makes sense.
“The manner in which one waits for elements to fall into place is far more important than the assistive capability of the software in your camera […] Two truths, one created by a bunch of Adobe’s programmers to impress and allegedly to aid in creativity, the other is the truth of aggregated knowledge along with the quirks inherent in every human mind.” — Stephen Jenner
“Perfect camera tech creates the illusion of unmediated vision. That amazing picture that looks like it’s real? That’s a deception. This – sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt – is the truth” — Jeff Sharlet, This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
As you probably can tell by all the references I’ve recently made to German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899-1976), I’ve had the misfortune of reading him at some length in the past few years. (Try reading Being and Time on your day off and you’ll better understand what I mean). I say ‘misfortune’ because he’s pretty much unreadable, obtuseness being part of his philosophical schtick, his assurance to you that he’s telling you something deep and profound if only you’re smart enough to understand.
Heidegger did say some important things, evident by his continued relevance in current academic discourse, even if, in addition to being unreadable, he was an odious fascist who embraced Nazism and flourished under it. Specifically, for our purposes, some interesting things to say about the visual artist and art, about the artist’s need for ‘authenticity’ and the process of self-definition creative pursuits offer us. [Remember: you as a photographer are a ‘visual artist’, so all of this applies to you].
Heidegger is considered an ‘Existentialist’, which, in addition to requiring you to sit in Parisian cafes and expound radical political theories, requires your belief that you don’t have any fixed nature but make yourself up as you go along i.e. there’s no such thing as ‘human nature’; you get to define yourself any way you want. For Heidegger, you are a ‘self-interpreting being’ who makes yourself what you are in the course of the activity of your life. To be human is to be an Artist of yourself.
Heidegger sees your ‘Art’ – the self-conscious practice of creating palpable expressions of your inner being i.e. you taking photos- as a part of the process of self-construction that constitutes your life. Heidegger is pointing to the immense importance of creative activities in the process of you being human. The process of creating ‘Art’ i.e. palpable things like novels or paintings or photographs – is distinct from, yet part of, that larger creative act that is your being. Think of your art as permanently fixed creative action, a temporal snapshot – a slice of life – you take from the larger evolving creative process that is your lived life.
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Susan, Cape Cod. Me Looking at Her Looking at Me – A Perfect Visual Encapsulation of Heidegger’s Theory of Self
We aren’t alone in this process of creating ourselves. In Heidegger’s view, our being is also defined by the world into which we are “thrown.” Your identity is only possible in what Heidegger calls “shared forms of life” in a “public life world.” There’s no you without the context provided by others, the world you didn’t choose but rather are thrown into. If this is true it introduces a certain serendipity into your supposed ‘self-creation’; you are responsible for creating yourself, yes, but your ability to do so is circumscribed in some sense by the existential realities of others. Insofar as your palpable creations are concerned i.e. your photos, they are the creations of an interactive process that presupposes a third party, the recipient of your work – the viewer, the critic – as a necessary part of the process by which you create yourself. If your art is a formative exchange between you and your work, Heidegger also understands it as a formative exchange between your work and others, and this dynamic is as much a part of the artwork as is your relationship to the work.
Post-Heideggerian heavy thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur share this ‘dialectical’ concept of truth in art. Only through this dialogue with your work and with others through your work can you authentically express yourself. The ‘meaning’ of an artwork is the sum of dialogue of differing viewpoints brought to the exchange, both spoken and unspoken, between you, and its viewer. What others think about your work matters to you.
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Philosophical speculation can be fascinating. Often, though, I find myself wondering whether a given philosopher’s thought mirrors reality rather than an elaborately spun intellectual puzzle. Is Heidegger correct? Are we really somehow defined by how others see us? Are we at the mercy of other’s understanding of what we’re doing? Does it really matter what others say of our self-expression? If so, it seems to compromise the very premise of Heidegger’s notion of art as self-construction. How is it ‘me creating myself through my life and my artistic decisions’ if my truth, my definition, is also dependent on your understanding? How could you possibly participate in my own self-definition? Seems a contradiction in terms.
I don’t buy it. If my photography is a form of ‘self-creation’ I shouldn’t need input into what I’m doing. I’m doing it for me, not you, and it needs to make sense to me and if it does it doesn’t matter to me if it makes sense to you. It’s why I’ve often resisted showing my work in public. I can’t remember ever getting a comment or critique that helped me understand what I was doing. It’s why photo competitions and portfolio critiques seem deflections of creative energy, and at worst, self-destructive. It’s the off-loading of creative responsibility on others, or, at the least, a refusal to take responsibility for your creative autonomy.
Critique my work all you want, it’s your right. I’m glad it’s out there and possibly a small piece in what helps you achieve your own self-definition. But don’t confuse your critique with something that’s going to aid me on my own creative path. You can’t know. You don’t have that power…unless I cede it to you, and if I cede it you, I’m abdicating my own responsibility for self-definition.
The bottom line: use your photography in a way that makes sense to you. Stop apeing others and create photos that have meaning for you. Forget the ‘shoulds’ that others always seem to want to impose on what is a uniquely personal and singular quest. Allow others to do the same. Each of us, in exercising our creative capacities is building a self. Build the self that works for you.
Daniel Kramer took this photo of Bob Dylan sitting on a stoop in Gramercy Park in New York City several weeks before Dylan recorded the 1965 sessions that became the iconic 60s album Highway 61 Revisited. It captures Dylan sitting in front of the apartment of his manager, Albert Grossman at 4, Gramercy Park West. Kramer placed Dylan’s friend Bob Neuwirth (carrying the Nikon SP with matching 50mm Nikkor 1.4 [you can identify the lens by the OEM Nikkor hood]) behind Dylan “to give it extra color”. Dylan is wearing a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand. Photographer Kramer commented in 2010 on Dylan’s expression, “He’s hostile, or it’s a hostile moodiness. He’s almost challenging me or you or whoever’s looking at it: ‘What are you gonna do about it, buster?’”
Highway 61 went on to be universally recognized as one of Dylan’s best works and among the greatest albums of all time, ranking No. 18 on Rolling Stone‘s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” . Its single Like a Rolling Stone is ranked the #1 Rock and Roll song ever on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Consider this: Positively Fourth Street, arguably one of Dylan’s greatest songs and an iconic 60s work on par with Like a Rolling Stone, wasn’t considered good enough to make it onto the album. Instead, it was released as a single in 1965 with From a Buick 6 as its B side.
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The SP was Nikon’s professional level 35mm rangefinder introduced in 1957 as a competitor to the Leica M3. It was the culmination of Nikon’s rangefinder development started in 1948 with the Nikon I, and was “arguably the most advanced rangefinder of its time.” Nikon stopped development of the S series rangefinders with the introduction and success of the Nikon F. Basically, you couldn’t give away an SP during the ’70s through the early ’90s. Today, they command premium prices, with the 2005 SP reissue routinely selling for $5k. It’s a beautiful camera in black paint paired with the legendary 35mm 1.8 W-Nikkor. The SP remains, with its uber-sophisticated dual rangefinders – one that projected parallax corrected frame lines for the 50, 85, 105 and 135 Nikkor lenses, a second with parallax frames for 28 and 35mm lenses – the most sophisticated non-metered 35mm rangefinder ever made by anyone, including Leica.
Miles Davis At Newport 1958. Miles with his Leica M3.
Miles Davis was a musical genius. ‘Genius’ is one of those designations that gets massively overused ( I just read a book on Garry Winogrand wherein he’s repeatedly referred to as a “genius”). It applies to Davis. He single-handily created a number of jazz idioms- cool jazz, bebop, fusion, and mentored many quartet era jazz greats – Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter. Like all geniuses, he wasn’t afraid to fail, and some of his stuff, especially his later ’70s era fusion work, seemed strained on arrival, a repudiation of much he had done in the ’40s through the brilliance of the ’60s, although in hindsight, some of it works in a way hard to recognize at the time. But the best of it – The late ’50s Coltrane Quintets, the early ’60s Shorter Quintets, the brilliant fusion of his 1970 Bitches Brew– is transcendently sui generous, stunningly one-of-a-kind in a way unlike anything else produced before or since.
If you buy one ‘real’ jazz album in your life ( as opposed to the dumbed-down muzik played on elevators and restaurants), I suggest his 1959 Kind of Blue, featuring Davis’s ensemble sextet of saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianist Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. So beautiful it will make you weep. In 2003 it was ranked #12 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time in any musical genre, a list compiled by influential 20th-century musicians, critics and producers. You know you’re good when your peers universally recognize your genius.
His autobiography. Miles, is a remarkable read. I highly recommend it, even if you’re not a jazz fan. It’s a fascinating study of the artistic psyche. Davis was raised in an upper-class black family – his father was a medical doctor – and Miles was classically educated both in music and the humanities. He was a man of great talent but also an elegant man of great style and sophistication, supremely confident in himself and his ability, as he should have been. But the shit he put up with as a black man in a white man’s world beggars belief. Conventional ’40s and ’50s white America treated him as an “uppity nigger” who didn’t recognize his place; Davis refused to play the game. Throughout, he coupled smoldering anger at ignorant, self-important white critics with a detached dignity that infuriated much of the jazz public. While relentlessly criticized for constant innovation, in retrospect he moved the jazz idiom along in necessary ways. He was both a fascinating artist and human being.
When asked about his Leica Miles claimed he knew little about it; as for his technical acumen, he just used the settings the man in the shop had shown him. I love that. Like his music, straight to the essence, no pretense.
Self Portrait with Feeding Tube, Raleigh, North Carolina, November 2020
I’ve been reading up on Diane Arbus recently. She’s someone I’ve always known about but never really taken to; there’s something off-putting about her work that makes me queasy when I look at it. It bothers me. I don’t think it’s because of the common criticism of her – she’s “exploiting” her subjects for her benefit; we, by definition, “exploit” the people we photograph – so much as what it says about her. Her daughter, Doon Arbus, in her postscript to the posthumous publication entitled Untitled, claimed her mom “wasn’t interested in self-expression,” which is a stunning misunderstanding coming from someone who should know better.
As William Todd Schultz argues in his fascinating ‘psychobiography’ of Arbus, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, Arbus’s work was all about herself, her externalization of an inner world produced by individual trauma. I recommend Schultz’s book to anyone interested in understanding the artistic process and what creates and nurtures it. From what I can see, Arbus had one fucked-up internal life. Maybe it explains why she took her own life at 47. Insofar as any work of art can be ‘explained,’ it explains it, or, at the least, puts it into a context that helps open up a dialogue with the artist and enhances the experience of the work itself. It’s made me rethink her work as something she wanted to tell me.
All of this is prelude to the fact that I’ve been contemplating documenting my recent medical experiences and putting them out there for you. You could read that as objective documentation or shameless self-absorption, depending on how you feel about what motivates these ‘documentary’ desires. What’s so special about me and my experience? Nothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t my experience, and it doesn’t necessarily preclude me from sharing it with you in a way that might – just might – mirror to you your own experience in some way. It can easily lapse into vulgarity, become a cheap attempt for attention or sympathy, but I’ll assume the risk. Frankly, the attention doesn’t interest me at all. When I started Leicaphilia years ago I did so with the intention of remaining anonymous, and I kept it that way for a number of years. But as time passed, and readership sorted itself out, I gradually engaged the blog to discuss more personal things, which seems more in the spirit of what I do as a ‘documentarian.’ Isn’t that the function of ‘documentary’ photography? The alternative is pictures of cats and fence posts.
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Checking in for Chemo
So, as regular readers know, I’m currently in the process of beating cancer or having it beat me. Stage Three Stomach Cancer. Nothing more traumatic than what millions of people experience every day for any number of reasons. Actually, I’m tempted at times to see my current travails as a blessing, a pedagogy about life, its value, and maybe even its meaning [I’m still unsure about the latter]. But it’s occurred to me that it would make a potentially interesting photo essay, and Leicaphilia gives me a platform to present it. So, that’s what I’m going to do, among all the usual things, going forward. Or, at least it’s what I’ve chosen to do today.
All of the photos below were of my chemo visit yesterday. Today I’m home, hooked up to some Frankensteinian device pumping poison into my system for two more days, after which I get monitored to see if my white blood cells are falling dangerously low and potentially necessitating another hospital stay. Luckily, my oncology doc tells me I’ve apparently got a very strong immune system. My white blood cell counts remain normal after chemo. As such, I don’t require the $8000 shot usually given to people after each chemo round. $8000 each shot, money upfront. That’s $64000 out of pocket for 8 rounds, not covered by any insurance I possess. When they scheduled me for it and explained the cost, I laughed. Right, like that’s gonna happen. America health care – all I can do is shake my head.
I ran across this 1973 ad for the Leica M5 and the Leicaflex SL and started thinking about the relative value of Leicas over time and how that value manifests itself today. Many of us consider our Leicas as ‘investments’ in the sense that it’s a pretty safe place to park some cash with the understanding that you’ll be able to get most, or all, or even more, out of it when you sell it. It’s a way I justify buying Leicas to my wife: we could either park an extra 3 grand in our bank account, serving no practical purpose except collecting chicken scratch for interest, or we could ‘invest’ it in the purchase of a Leica, a thing I’ll use and handle and admire and get some practical satisfaction from. I’ll take photos with it and it will inspire me to write about it on the blog. I’ll either like it or I won’t, but I’ll have the experience of having owned it, used it, better understood and appreciated it. And then, if we need the money again, I’ll sell it to a Leicaphilia reader and usually break even. Voila! Money put to good use. And a reader gets a decent deal on a decent camera that they know they can trust. What’s not to like? Of course, Leica could help me circumvent this process by sending me a camera or two to test, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Who knows? Surprise me, Leica. I promise you an honest review.
The first thing that struck me was how expensive, in real terms, the M5 was in relation to the Leica models that had come before. If you run the purchase price numbers given by Leica through an inflation calculator, you’ll come up with the equivalent amount of circa 2021 dollars that purchase price represents. So, for example, buying a Leica Model II d in 1939 for $100 was the equivalent of paying $1900 for it in today’s dollar; a IIIg in 1958 for $163 would be the equivalent of paying $1467 for it today ( interestingly enough, the Professional Nikon, the Nikon SP, with a 50mm Nikkor f/1.4, sold in 1958 for today’s equivalent of $3,000); today an M3 would cost new $2373, the M4 $2320. Expensive, but not prohibitively so. The M5 body, were it sold today, would cost $3663. That’s a big increase in price over the iconic M3 and M4. With a decent Leitz 50mm Summilux (the lens it’s wearing in the Leica advert), it’d cost you >$6000 in today’s money. So, Leicas were pricey even back then. And the M5, now the unloved ugly duckling selling at a discount to the M2-M7, commanded a premium price over the iconic M2, M3 and M4.
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Nikon Price Guide From 1976: Click on it to enlarge it and open it up in a new tab
It also gives us some sense of why the M5 might have ‘failed’ in the market [arguable, but that’s a discussion for another time], as opposed to its failure as an evolution of the M system [which it most certainly was not]. In addition to being technically deficient as a pro ‘system’ camera (based on the inherent drawbacks of a rangefinder) in relation to the Nikon F2 and Canon Ftn, it cost a fortune. To compare, a Nikon F2 Photomic with 50mm Nikkor 1.4, then the state-of-the-art, retailed for $600, although in actuality it sold out-the-door for maybe $500. The M5, you paid full price. Throw in $350 for a Summilux. In today’s money, that means buying a new Nikon F2 with 50mm 1.4 Nikkor in 1973 would set you back $3100, while an M5 with a 50mm 1.4 Summilux in 1973 would cost the equivalent of $6070 today. The M5 with lens was essentially double the price of the top shelf Pro Nikon with lens, which was then the professional’s system of choice.
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What do they go for today? You can sell the M5 and Summilux you bought in 1973 today, almost 50 years later, for +/- $3500. It’s probably going to need a going-over by one of the few techs who still work on the M5 – Sherri Krauter, DAG, one or two others, but that’s the buyer’s problem, not yours. Not a bad return for a camera you’ve used for 48 years. An M4 body, purchased in 1969 for $2300 will fetch you $1500-$1800; a single stroke M3 $1300-$1500; a Leica II d you paid $1900 for in 1939, today, you’ll you get +/- $300. Not exactly a prudent “investment” if you’re looking for a return on your money, but certainly excellent resale value of something you’ve used for half to three/quarters of a century. Like most things Leica, what appears crazy can in reality be quite prudent. Taking it all into consideration, buying a Leica is, moneywise, pretty much a smart idea.
Buddy, Donna and Abby, Carolina Beach, Summer 2020
Stuck as I am at home, a function of Covid and Chemo, I’ve been reading a mind-numbing amount of internet arguments re: film vs. digital. Everyone has an opinion. I certainly do; much of this blog for the last 7 years has been dedicated to flogging that opinion at every available opportunity. My take: yes, there’s a ‘film look’ that differs from digital, and it’s ‘better.’ Film has an unmistakable heft to it, a solidity, that digital capture is incapable of reproducing however much you run the file through whatever emulation software you prefer. It has to do with 1) the non-linear vs. linear capture of film v. digital; 2) the organic grain structure of film and its function in capturing the image v. ‘grain’ superficially overlaid after the capture; and 3), to a lesser extent, the more “classic” rendition of film era optics v. the clinical perfection of highly corrected digital era optics. Or so we say.
FILM :Me, Jorge and Florence, Van Gogh House, Auvers sur Oise, 2014 Contax G2, HP5, D76
DIGITAL: Me in My Paris Flat, 2003, Nikon D2
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So, I was thinking of all these issues as I printed the photo of my wife and the mutts above. Take my word for it – it’s a technically stunning print, wet or digital, a perfect B&W print…or at least I think so. (You can right-click on any of the three images here and ask that it be viewed in a new window..and it will bring up a higher resolution image that you can pixel-peep). Hopefully, the scan of it above gives ‘some’ sense of it as a print. Of course, given we are, by definition, debating this via a digital medium makes the whole issue suspect to begin with. But, as you know, half the fun is in debating these insoluble issues and holding firm opinions on them. So, putting that aside for a moment, and given that almost all photography is viewed digitally these days…can you tell whether this is film or digital capture? And if not, what are we arguing about anymore?
You have two options:
It’s taken with a Leica M5, 25mm f4 Voigtlander, yellow filter, (expired) Ilford Pan-F rated at 50 ISO and developed in D76, scanned with a Plustek 7400, marginal contrast post-processing in Lightroom, output sharpening (low); or
It’s taken with a Sigma sd Quattro, Sigma DC 17-50 2.8 EX HSM, effective focal length 25mm, ISO 125 DNG file pre-sharpened in Nik Sharpener, processed in Silver Efex Pro as a Pan-F emulation.
Can you tell the difference? Can you articulate why? What, if anything, gives it away? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If Leica announced they were going to offer a brand new M2, built to the original specs, coupled with a state-of-the-art Summilux 50mm f1.4 and original lens hood- and offer it as a kit for $1600, I suspect you’d happily sell your grandmother into white slavery for a chance to buy as many as possible. The lens alone would be worth the price.
Why then can’t people give away the brand new in box Nikon S3 2000 editions stowed away fifteen years ago when Nikon released the S3 Millennial edition?Think of this. A New Leica M-A, the current iteration of Leica’s mechanical film M, sells new for $5195, with free shipping; for the 50mm Summilux add an extra $4395. That’s $9590. (Given you’re buying it from B&H in New York, add $870 in local sales tax: total price door to door $10,540). Yet today you can find an unused, never taken out of the box S3 Millennial, with 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor that is every bit the equal of the MA with Summilux, for $1600 or thereabout on eBay ( hell, I’d argue that the S3 is better built than the MA). And few people seem to want them. That’s crazy.
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Millenial Nikon S3 with W-Nikkor 35mm 1.8
In 1957 a LEICA M2 and 50mm f/1.4 lens sold for about $3800 in today’s money, while the pro Nikon, the Nikon SP went for $3,000 with a 50mm Nikkor f/1.4. Released in 1958, Nikon designed the S3 as the lower-cost alternative to the SP, sort of the equivalent of the Leica M2 in relation to the M3. The only real difference between the SP and the S3 was the viewfinder. While the SP employed two separate viewfinders that covered the 28/35/50/85/105 and 135 fields of view, the S3 employed a single viewfinder with fixed 35mm, 50mm, and 105mm framelines and no parallax correction or frame switching. Frankly, if you confined your needs to a 50 or 35, the S3 was as good as the SP, certainly as robust and well- built. In 1958, the S3 with 50mm f/1.4 cost ¥86,000 (about $2600 in today’s money) compared to the SP which was ¥98,000.
Black Paint S3 Millennial With 50mm 1.4 Nikkor-S
In 2000 Nikon reproduced the original S3 and offered it as the S3 2000 (“S3 Millennial”), an exact duplicate of their classic 1958 S3 in chrome finish. Nikon produced 8000 cameras by hand assembly, 300 per month. In 2002 Nikon released the black paint S3 2000 with a production of 2000 units. Nikon’s cost was more than the selling price of the camera, over $6,000 each. The initial retail price for both the chrome and black paint the kit was around $6000, and most were bought up by collectors and put on the shelf with an eye to appreciation. The rise of digital photography, however, knocked the legs out from under the S3 as an investment, and many collectors are selling their new, unused, still in the box Millennial S3’s for pennies on the dollar. Today you can find an unused, never taken out of the box S3 with f/1.4 Nikkor for $1600 on eBay.
With the M2/M3 in 1955, Leica came up with an enduring design that made the camera a natural extension of the photographer’s hand. The M3 embodied minimalist functionality at its best, radically simple, both in design and function, everything accessible with minimum fuss. Of course, the M2/M3 was the inspiration for Nikon’s first pro rangefinder, but the SP included some of its own innovations. For example, with its forward focusing wheel and shutter release to the rear of the top plate, it was designed to allow your index finger at the shutter trigger while using your middle finger to focus with the focusing wheel. One-hand operation. (This is how the Nikon F, built on the rangefinder platform, inherited its unwieldy shutter position – the recessed shutter position had been designed to accommodate the focus wheel of the rangefinder series, but, of course, made no sense on the F which didn’t have a focusing wheel. Nikon moved the shutter trigger forward on the bottom-up designed F2).
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Nikon S3 Millennial with 50mm Nikkor f/1.4 and Leica M2-R with DR Summicron
The S3 has the same minimalist ethos as the Leica, simple to use and very reliable. It’s also made to the same incredible high manufacturing standards, hand-built in the same manner as the M. And the Millennial Nikkor 50 is an exceptional lens, every bit the equal of the current Leica optics. While Nikon claims it’s a faithful recreation of the 50 era Nikkor 50, it does use modern coatings and tighter tolerances, and its output is markedly superior to the original Nikkor of which it is a recreation. It’s a testament to Nikon’s optical expertise that a 50-year-old optical design can match the best modern Leica optics.
So, if you want a new fully mechanical precision film rangefinder built by one of history’s iconic manufacturers, you can spend $10,540 on a Leica M-A with ASPH Summilux 50 – or you can buy a chrome S3 Millennial kit on eBay for $1600-$1800 (or if you want the black paint version, $2700. I’ve got a chrome version, which I actually prefer to the black paint version. For me, old Nikon rangefinders should be chrome). And, given Voigtlander offers many of their excellent and reasonably priced rangefinder lenses in Nikon S mount (21mm f4, 25mm f4, 28mm 3.5, 35mm 2.5, 50mm 2.5, 50mm 1.5, 85mm 3.5) you can assemble a nice system of new, modern optics for your new S3 without the problems that come along with 50-year-old lenses. If you choose the S3 Millennial, you can have the “Leica Experience” without the price premium, the snobbery and buffoonery, the condescending elitism, the ignorant comments from the hoi polloi, the envious looks from the guy with the x100; just the simple joy of using a superbly made mechanical rangefinder with a wide choice of excellent optics. And the camera is new – nobody else’s problems to deal with.
I ran across this stunning photo in The Guardian the other day. It’s by Paolo Pellegrin, a member of the Magnum Photos agency and winner of ten World Press Photo awards. There’s something timeless about the photo, harkening back to the best photojournalism of the Leica era. What interests me is his choice of B&W, which is a conscious nod to the traditional mid-century photo journalist aesthetic even though he’s fully digital – he shoots with a Canon 5d with a limited selection of lenses. Unlike most zoom-happy digiphiles, Pellegrin restricts his use to 28mm, 35mm, and 50mm primes, which itself betrays his film era roots. He retains some misgivings about digital: “In general, I embrace digital photography as an evolution of the medium, but I dislike the ease with which it can be manipulated. When you deal with charged issues, like people in war, you need to be able to trust the photographer.”
Unfortunately, IMO, he hasn’t reached far back enough for the traditionalist nod. The photo, which I grabbed from his website and thus presumably is printed to his specifications, suffers from that ‘thin’ ‘brittle’ look of much of digital B&W ( Heidegger calls animal consciousness “world-poor” in contrast to human consciousness [he’s wrong]; I think of digital capture as “reality-poor” in contrast to film capture [I’m right]). It would be much better as a ‘film’ image I think, so I’ve taken the liberty of reconfiguring it to how I see it. You may or may not agree.
What’s instructive is how easy it is to convert an obvious digitally captured image to one that looks indistinguishable from something shot with an M4 and some Plus-X. That being the case, do we really need those old film cameras or is that just one more affectation the passage of time is proving wrong? More interestingly, is the “film” look itself now an anachronism, a ‘manipulation’ that Pellegrin thinks we shouldn’t trust? If so, are we now then, by default, stuck with world-poor digital rendering?
“I photograph to see what things look like photographed.” Garry Winogrand
One of the things I appreciate about photography is that it gives you permission to look. Most of the time I don’t. I’m usually operating on auto-pilot, oblivious to anything around me except something that’s outside normal expectations. I suspect we all live this way, conserving our limited attention for when evolution had bred in us a need – fight/flight, sex, food. What about our aesthetic sense – which evolution has clearly prioritized as a basic human need? How might we indulge a sense of beauty? Does being a photographer assist in some way? I think it does.
Garry Winogrand was onto something when he decided to photograph things to see what they looked like when photographed. He was one of the first photographers to recognize the camera’s potential to make us see things. It both gives us permission to look and creates new visual realities, showing us things we otherwise wouldn’t see. The nice thing about the digital age is I now always carry a camera with me, which allows me to always be looking at things in terms of what they might look like photographed. Back in the film era, that really wasn’t possible, unless you were a lunatic like Winogrand who left behind 6500 unprocessed rolls of film at his death. Today, all you need is your iPhone and some attention. Winogrand would have gone nuts with an iphone.
Think of photography as a means to discover things, a way of saying “Look at what I saw!’ Often times (not always) it’s not so much a way of documenting what is but rather discovering new ways things might look if you leave yourself open to it. And because it’s about leaving yourself open to seeing how things might look, everything is opened up to you as a subject. An afternoon walk with the dogs and an iPhone can become an exercise in seeing things. This is a profound gift digital photography gives us. It turns a routine walk into an aesthetic experience…if we let it. That’s pretty cool.
All photos taken with an iPhone 8 and processed in camera with Snapseed
1978: Me the Brooding Art Photographer. What Did I think I was Doing?
Why do we take photographs? Why, for many of us, is the act of photographing so central to our lives and who we are? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately. I’m not sure I have the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the fleeting nature of time and a desire to arrest its flow.
I’ve been photographing ‘seriously’ since I was 12. By ‘serious’ I mean intentionally engaged in the practice of photography as something more than merely reflexively recording meaningful moments in time. Granted, much of the pleasure I’ve derived from my interest has been centered around my fascination with cameras. What started the whole thing was a 7th-grade teacher, Mr. Smith, showing me his plain prism Nikon F. I was hooked. From there I was lucky enough to purchase a succession of increasingly impressive cameras, culminating in a Leica in 1977 (for those of you not around then, a Leica was a quasi-mystical thing that cost 5x a normal camera if you could find one; it didn’t really do anything more than a Nikon F did, rather it marked you out as photographic cognoscenti. It appealed to snobs even then.)
I’ve always understood my interest in photography to serve a larger purpose, but I’m not sure I’d have been able to articulate what that purpose is/was. Maybe that’s the point of what great thinkers have noted about language and reality; the net of language misses much of what we experience. Maybe photography is a way of articulating things language can’t. Maybe it’s an inarticulate attempt to establish a sense of permanence amidst the relentless passage of time, a way of memorializing the fact that ‘this happened.’
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Me 42 Years Later
A week or so ago I was told I had 6 months to live. Aside from the more existential questions that raises (e.g. “Are you fucking kidding me?”), it brought home to me the question of what I’d been doing photographically for the past 50 years. Maybe there was a purpose in it all. Interestingly enough, one of the first things my wife told me I needed to do in the next months was to put my entire photographic library in order so she would have access to it and some sense of what she was looking at. What she said made sense to me. It seems important I do that.
But Why? When I have such limited time, what purpose could devoting much of it to cataloging a photo collection as opposed to ‘living’ whatever remaining time I have? Wouldn’t my time be better served with a trip to Europe to say goodbye to dear friends, or traveling someplace I’d always wanted to see, or simply indulging whatever particular desires I might want to indulge…smoking, drinking, recreational heroin use (I must admit, I am seriously considering buying a Ducati Panagale V4 so as to enjoy outrunning hapless North Carolina Sheriff’s Deputies throughout the backroads of the state).
I’m of the belief that people only really ‘die’ when the last person who remembers them dies. You live on in the people who love you and carry your memory. My father, who died ten years ago, seems as alive to me now as he ever has, a large reason being the photographs I have of him. It’s something more than the mere photograph itself. It’s remembering the entire experience the photo conjures as me the photographer and my father as my subject. Photos support and enlarge his memory, helping keep him alive. It’s an invaluable gift photography gives us.
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Back When I Thought I’d Live Forever
So, I’ve since been told that there’s a ‘chance’ I might be cured, or at least my life prolonged past the proverbial ‘six months.’ Hope springs eternal, as they say. A few rounds of chemo, a few surgeries and I’m as good as new. I’m now considering all the things I’ve yet to do after I get through with the medical issues. I’m still going to be putting my photography in order though, just in case.
As you’ve noticed, Leicaphilia has gone dormant the last few months – not from lack of interest on my part but because of health issues. I am currently in treatment for stage 3 stomach cancer. I’ve been dealing with fairly serious gastrointestinal issues for the past year with repeated hospitalizations, which explains the hit-and-miss nature of the blog the last year…but it’s only recently that I’ve received a cancer diagnosis. Obviously, that’s my focus going forward.
I’m hoping to continue with Leicaphilia in the future but am not sure of when or if. I’ll keep you informed.
These lenses may have been pointed at Joseph Stalin
Someone on a Canadian internet site is selling the above items – a Hecktor 3.5cm and Elmar 13.5cm 4.5 and assorted crap – for $3000 US, claiming they were owned by Stalin’s secretary. Got the written receipt and everything. Unfortunately, you can’t confirm through the seller because she killed herself some years ago. The Elmar doesn’t have a serial number.
This could all be true and completely above-board. It might not. Who knows?
— This very special lot belonged to the private collection of Major-General Alexander Poskrebyshev (1891-1965), chief of the special department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Joseph Stalin’s “faithful dog”. —I obtained this lot from Alexandra Sergeevna Poskrebysheva, daughter of Elena Alexandrovna Poskrebysheva, who was the Major General’s daughter from his third marriage to Ekaterina Grigorevna Poskrebysheva (maiden name Zimina). In 2014, after exchanging a few back-and-forth emails, Alexandra sent me the items from Moscow via Russian Post. The tracking number (search RA212147803RU on Pochta.ru) shows her name signed on the bottom: Poskrebysheva A S
In the package, she included a handwritten signed certificate (in Russian and English) that confirmed the legitimacy of the lot’s historical heritage. The certificate reads:”This certifies that this Leica leather case obtaining two Leitz Wetzlar prime lenses with the ranges of 135mm and 5cm, as well as two manual measuring/viewfinder accessories, belonged to the private collection of the Soviet Major-General, Alexander Nikolaevich Poskrebyshev, Chief of the special department of the Central Committee of Communist Party. (signed) Alexandra Poskrebysheva, daughter of Elena Poskrebysheva”
My communication with Alexandra, a respected doctor in Moscow, was very pleasant and productive. Sadly, when randomly searching her name last year, I found out that Alexandra took her own life in December of 2017, at the age of 49 years old (article in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/news/society/1361859-vnuchka/). Another article (https://www.mk.ru/social/2017/12/05/v-moskve-posle-otravleniya-gospitalizirovana-vnuchka-aleksandra-poskrebysheva-sekretarya-stalina.html) suggests that the woman was very lonely and likely depressed.
*** For this reason, and in order to pay it forward, I will be donating 10% of the earnings from this sale to a mental health charity of the winner’s choice, and in their name ***
WHAT YOU’RE GETTING:1) Leitz Hektor 5cm f2.5 lens – NO SERIAL NUMBER, absolutely pristine condition, clear glass, smooth aperture and focus. +++ Rear and front caps. 2) Leitz Elmar 135mm f4.5 lens – Serial Number 231 — Great condition with some external signs of use, clear glass, smooth aperture and focus ring. — No caps 3) Leitz Viewfinder – Great condition4 ) Leitz Rangefinder – Great condition 5) Leitz leather case – Great condition 6) Two signed certificates, written in Russian and English.
“Silence is the hidden content of the words that count.” A.G Sertillanges
I’m suspicious of critics who write about photography as an art form. I don’t think I’ve ever read a critical essay about a specific photograph or body of photographs that has in any sense added to, or explained, the experience given by the photograph itself. This is not to say that there isn’t good writing about photography. There is. Sontag and Barthes come to mind, but what they are doing is writing about photography as a practice and not attempting to explain or supplement the truth of specific photos. Reason, as expressed in language, can not articulate visual truths. Reason’s last step, according to Blaise Pascal, is to recognize its limitations.
For that matter, photographers who attempt to explain their work via written captions or accompanying essays seem to me to be missing the very point of visual art itself: visual art expresses that which can’t be expressed with words. To use a metaphor of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, words are a net we strain reality through. A lot gets through the net. What the visual arts offer us is a portion of that reality that gets through the net of language.
This, I think, is the power of photography and why many of us are drawn to it in a very profound way. It’s a means of expressing things that can’t be expressed verbally. The photograph above is an example. I found it on a roll of film I recently developed. I don’t now remember its specifics – why the took it, what I saw in it, if anything at the time – but now, as a finished product standing by itself, it denotes something to me. It presents something visible to me, something that resonates with me. Whatever it is, it’s not capable of being put into words. It represents that portion of reality Kant would say has slipped through the net of language.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked on the human urge to “run up against the limits of language.” We instinctively understand that words somehow deaden the fullness of our experiences. According to Isaiah Berlin, this is the paradox of language when faced with profundity: “the more I say the more remains to be said … as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end. Whatever description I give always opens the doors to something further, something even darker, perhaps, but certainly something which is in principle incapable of being reduced to precise, clear, verifiable, objective prose.”
German philosopher Martin Heidegger agrees with Wittgenstein and Berlin…up to a point. Much of Heidegger’s philosophy is about limits, of knowledge, of words, of expression. For Heidegger, logical thought -i.e. that which can be expressed – is not sufficient when we’re trying to talk about certain things. “The very idea of “logic” disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning,” wrote Heidegger. Wittgenstein, Berlin and Heidegger all agree there is more of life than can be articulated. Heidegger, however, makes the further claim that what happens in the interstices between words is what’s really important. This is where we find the most profound truths. For Heidegger, this is a qualitative advance on what Kant was saying. Kant (and Wittgenstein and Berlin) was saying that some reality slips past the net of language. Heidegger is claiming that the most important part of reality slips through the net.
So, how do we communicate this most important portion of the real? Heidegger attempted to do so via language. This is the paradox of Heidegger and the reason he’s so hard to understand. He is attempting, with words, to express the truth that words miss the larger truth. This is purposeful. Heidegger holds that we should try to say something about the interstices – that the fact that we recognize an interstice means that there’s something to be said about it, however vague and preliminary that might be. Not directly, perhaps, and not even particularly clearly, but we shouldn’t abandon all efforts to use words to speak about things that lie beyond language. Unfortunately, Heidegger never took the next logical step of analyzing the visual arts and what role they might play in the process of expressing what’s true. I believe he might have found a way out of his expressive paradox had he done so.
A Genuine Special Order black paint Leica M Owned by Busby Cattanach. Offered for Sale by Third Man Cameras in Stuart Florida.
Many of you may remember Henry Obert (aka Henry Obertiii) and Erica Obert, the hapless “Leica Experts” pawning off repainted Leicas with all sorts of faked provenances on Ebay a few years ago. ( https://leicaphilia.com/caveat-emptor-again/ ). It was a fairly transparent scam, although a number of folks with more money than sense ended up buying “genuine” black paint lenses and/or bodies for stupid money from these morons. My sense: if you’re stupid enough to fall for the con, you deserve it.
It took only a few internet searches from the comfort of my home and I discovered that Mr. and Ms. Obert were garden-variety crackheads who had bought a large stock of excess Leica parts and went into business faking black paint items and then selling them on Ebay under the moniker of “Third Man Cameras.” Some quick correspondence with Ms. Obert – Third Man’s “Office Manager” – easily uncovered the whole scam. It didn’t hurt that a few Google queries uncovered mugshots for both from a crack cocaine arrest.
Henry Joseph Obert, Leica Specialist
Just for the hell of it, having nothing better to do, today I did an updated Google search for these two and found a 2018 arrest for Henry – a felony charge of, apparently, selling counterfeit concert tickets. That’s his mugshot for that arrest over on the right. Apparently, the internet notoriety drove him out of the Fake Leica business and into fake concert tickets. Erica, meanwhile, having apparently moved on from both Henry and her job as “Office Manager” of Third Man Cameras, is currently waitressing in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
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UPDATE JULY 10, 2020
And then, one final search found this, which is sad for the poor bicyclist Mr. Obert recently hit and injured while driving impaired:
JENSEN BEACH — A Port St. Lucie man was accused of hitting a bicyclist while he was driving under the influence in Martin County.
Henry Obert, 44, of the 3300 block of Southwest Vendome Street in Port St. Lucie was arrested on one charge of driving under the influence causing serious bodily harm to others.
Florida Highway Patrol troopers said around 7:35 p.m. Thursday they were called about a bicyclist hurt after being hit by Obert. When troopers arrived, they said they found the bicyclist seriously injured. It is unclear what hospital the bicyclist was taken to and what his condition is Friday. Despite multiple attempts, a spokesman for FHP was unable to be reached. Troopers said the crash happened at Jensen Beach Boulevard and Northeast Sunview Terrace in Jensen Beach.
…is currently for sale on Ebay for $395,000. Payable by Paypal.
“The last Leica M3 and “Newest” Leica M3 made. Production serial No. 1164865. UNIQUE, RARE, OUTSTANDING and SPECTACULAR in every respect!From the last and smallest batch of 20 cameras made in 1966, this being the FINAL and LAST camera of the production line and the final termination of THE GREATEST RANGEFINDER camera EVER MADE if not THE GREATEST CAMERA ever made.A true historical find and in NEW condition, NEVER USED, IN NEW condition as it left the factory more than 60 YEARS ago! With the original matching serial No. service card and (red + white ) rope that came with the camera, box, foam fittings, caps and allNEW! condition with the original untouhed “L” seal.Along with letters of authenticity from Leica, special order request, original matching order # from the original owner in 1968, receipt and additional letter from Leica to reiterate the authenticity of this camera. “
Seriously. Would you pay $400k for a Leica M3? And if you would, would you think of buying it on Ebay?
In “Santa Barbara, Calif., 1977,” Wessel took a picture of a man standing on a lawn staring at a flock of birds in flight. Wessel had been standing at a bus stop at the time. “As I approached this scene, the birds were feeding in the grass,” he said. “Startled for some reason, they took flight. I instinctually shot, exposing three frames before they were gone. When I look at it now, I marvel at how much of the world is hidden in the flux of time.”
Henry Wessel Jr. (1942-2018) grew up in Ridgefield, New Jersey. He studied psychology at Penn State University, graduating in 1966. After he came upon Mr. Szarkowski’s book “The Photographer’s Eye” and through it discovered the work of Eugene Atget, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Wright Morris and Garry Winogrand, he abandoned psychology and pursued photography. Wessel’s photographs are deceptively simple, yet there’s ‘something’ contained within them that, while inarticulable, is noticeably present. Like all good visual art, there’s a tension contained within it, something that requires the viewer’s imagination to complete.
Wessel moved to southern California in 1969. He was fascinated by the western light from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles. “I walked out of the airport into one of those clear, sharp-edged January days,” he said. “The light had such physical presence; it looked as though you could lean against it.” That physicality of light is a feature of so many of his photographs.“The high Western light that fills his pictures seems almost hallucinatory,” Tod Papageorge, former director of the graduate program in photography at Yale, wrote in an email to The Times in 2006. The Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sandra Phillips, described his work as “witty, evocative, and inventive… distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s.”
Wessel headed the photography program at the San Francisco Art Institute, joining its faculty in 1973. He advised his students that after they took their pictures, developed the film, and printed the contact sheets, they should put them away for a year. “If you let some time go by before considering work that you have done, you move toward a more objective position in judging it,” he said. “The pleasure of the subjective, physical experience in the world is a more distant memory and less influential.”
According to Wessel, the most important photographic choices were “where to stand and when to shoot,” followed by keeping technological choices to a minimum. Learn to use one camera and one lens. By limiting your tools to a single camera – a Leica M with 28mm – your sense of how light translates to film, and then to paper, would become instinctive. Mr. Wessel was never without his Leica and always alert to what was going on around him.“Most musicians I know don’t just play music on Saturday night,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.”
The street cafe provides a unique setting, special to cities: a place people can sit lazily, legitimately, be on view, and watch the world go by […]. Encourage local cafes to spring up in each neighborhood. Make them intimate places, with several rooms, open to a busy path, so people can sit with coffee or a drink, and watch the world go by. Build the front of the cafe so a set of tables stretch out of the cafe, right into the street.
Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, p. 437,439
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by Stephen Jennner
If the current “pandemic” has done anything for us ordinary folk, I suppose the chance to get off of the bus and reflect on the way we live and interact has probably been uppermost. It has also given us time to undertake a real “spring clean”, many of us are combing through our clutter, looking for stuff to throw out or retain. Every time we come across something that we had almost forgotten, the memories come flooding back. Such is the legacy of modern materialism. I have been re-reading some of Leicaphilia’s recent blogs and one strand in particular led me to re-read Camera Lucida which I had not really read properly initially, but kept on the shelf, because I liked some of the pictures. I realised also that it is a translation, and very well regarded, but perhaps less readable in English.
There was also the recent passing of the well known English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who I knew by name, but whose work I had never read. The ritual disdain verging on the celebration of his death by the institutionalised lefty media led me to investigate. He couldn’t have been that bad after all, I thought. I read England an Elegy first and enjoyed that, so I sallied forth and bought two more books, How to be a Conservative and Green Philosophy – How to think seriously about the planet, the first of those two was the thinner, so I read that, I am currently ploughing through the second, over 400 pages. They are very readable and surprisingly accessible for being the work of someone who is described as a philosopher.
But, back to the COVID clearout, since the last of our kids cleared off, the room in which he festered has been where everything material gets discarded, and was becoming impassable. So it was there that the great undermining began. It wasn’t long before I came across a pile of books, discarded but kept, because of a “one day I will read that again” sentiment. My eyes settled on a book that I have read and gushed over for nearly forty years, and I sat down and started leafing through it once again. I don’t know much about the authors, I think they are American, or at least naturalised Americans, the names look English, Japanese and Jewish, but together they have produced a universal language, which has since established a format that is used repeatedly, notwithstanding the specialised blog format, where the host invokes others to chime in by way of comment, and sometimes submit their own pieces.
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The book is called A Pattern Language and the credited authors are Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, along with contributions by Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel”. Think of it as a photo book about issues of social architecture; there are many excellent photographs and illustrations accompanying the text, many by well-known exponents, some unattributed snappers and daubers, and I presume, some by the authors.
The theme of A Pattern Language is in a nutshell, how to approach, conceptualise and plan for the built environment for a beautiful, practical and sustained past, present and future. It is profoundly conservative in sentiment rather than its political allegiances, regarding human beings as essentially animals that are universally similar, yet differ locally and thus and employ different ways of being, different traditions, different gods. The layout is very structured, the book indexed by levels of what the authors regard as layers of significance.
There are several main headings which are then further subdivided, beginning with a “summary of the language”, then describing “independent regions”, “towns”, “buildings” and finally “construction”. Those main headings are further subdivided into small one or two-page chapters, which are described in levels of importance by the addition of either no, one or two asterisks appended to the title. Each chapter describes a particular aspect of human habitation along with an illustration or photograph by way of visual explanation. The photographs serve the text well, lending an added meaning that isn’t capable of being articulated by words. The book is an object lesson on the different meanings conveyed by the written and the visual, how the two are distinct yet can accommodate each other to produce a larger meaning.
I had never really appreciated the importance of the photographs until I read Roland Barthes book again, even though I had not related that book to A Pattern Language until I picked it up and read it again. The feelings that a good photograph can imbue, and the memories that resurface, being what I believe Barthes devotes Camera Lucida to.
One of my favourite little chapters is entitled “Zen View” and the opening illustration is a painting by Pierre Bonnard. The text describes a beautiful view in Japan, including in the distance, the sea. Many a modern architect would design a massive window into the main room of the building that he is constructing. The Zen approach might be to instead, include a small window facing the view, halfway up a staircase. It is only seen as one climbs or descends that staircase, sometimes one stops, usually in a slightly different position to look and consider, every time, the prevailing conditions whether it is night or day, sunny, raining or shady, the view, the light, is different. It never bores, but since you deliberately stopped, invokes a new thought or memory. The effect is to really see. Sublime.
The experience that I derive from this book, is that human beings all have similar needs, even though at a local level, we have different ways of solving them. They are never fixed, since newer ideas and threats regularly surface and need to be incorporated into those ways, and the best way to do this is to ensure that the paramount human urge is conservative and localist and most importantly, not de(con)structive. In my view and that of the authors, the manner in which we can solve our global problems is by looking after our local community issues through negotiation, a public secularity, local judgements where disputes arise, and a sense of history applied to the present and held in trust, for the sake of those yet to be. It is what the ancient Greeks, and Roger Scruton (among others) sum up in one word – “Oikophilia”. The love of home and beauty, and the avoidance of mere utility. If we look after the parts that are within our scope, we can manage the whole planet, and hold it in trust for the foreseeable future. And the method for achieving this, is what the Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke described as “The little platoons”.
Anyway, to sum up, this book is an essential read, and I note that Amazon still lists it, if anyone wants to take a punt.
