Leica Made Cameras Portable—and Immortalized Icons

Let’s pretend it’s 150 years ago and you wanted to have your picture taken. You’d have to get yourself to a photo studio and be prepared to spend time and money. The photographer would get under the drape of his wet-collodion camera—a milk crate-sized box bolted to a tripod—then remove the lens cover. Since it took up to five minutes for the light to react to the silver halides on the glass plate, you’d have to sit completely still, a task accomplished by attaching metal braces to your head and neck—“iron instruments of torture,” as one observer termed them. Sound like fun? Of course not. Sitters hated it. But photographers, who dreamed of cameras they could take into the field, hated it even more. One of those was a German optician named Oskar Barnack, who, in 1925, would set millions of photographers (and their subjects) free with a diminutive gadget known as the Leica. Even if you’ve never heard the Leica name, your life has been touched by it. The Smithsonian Institution credits the Leica with being “responsible for popularizing 35 mm film photography.” Leica introduced the notion of the pocket camera 82 years before the iPhone did. Solid brass, weatherproof and equipped with laboratory-grade lenses, the Leica not only brought photography onto the street but also essentially created photojournalism in the process. When a young sailor kissed a nurse in Times Square on the day World War II ended, Alfred Eisenstaedt made that moment iconic with his Leica. And when James Dean got caught in a Manhattan downpour without an umbrella in 1955, Dennis Stock and his Leica were on hand, too. That famous portrait of Che Guevara that’s hanging in half the dorm rooms of America? Leica again: shot by Alberto Korba in 1960. Of course, it’s fine to wax nostalgic about great old photography (Leica, for the record, went digital in 2006), but these days even for artists and photojournalists, smartphones often carry the water. And, in fact, Leica’s global marketing director Andrea Pacella carries a smartphone himself. But, he explained, there are inalienable attributes that will always belong to a camera. “If you intentionally carry a camera, you are willing to expand your senses,” he said. “With a smartphone, you react. With the camera, you are a hunter, putting your mind actively to the exercise of creating an image.” Creating images with a Leica is not cheap, either. The recently introduced Leica M11 lists for close to $9,000. But they sell, for the same reason that Patek Philippe watches and Bentley sedans do: Hand-built engineering just has a certain feel to it. “Shooting with a Leica is like a long, tender kiss,” photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson observed, “like firing an automatic pistol, like an hour on the analyst’s couch.” The little camera that could When it debuted in 1925, Barnack’s Leica I was revolutionary in several ways. Since Ernst Leitz was an optical firm that made microscopes, Barnack availed himself of a 50 mm f3.5 lens that was among the best in the world. The compact metal case was also light-years ahead of box cameras like Kodak’s Brownie. But Barnack’s enduring contribution would be the medium. Thanks to Thomas Edison’s men, 35 mm film had been perfected, but was only used in movies. Barnack flipped the film sideways and used it for still photography, creating the rectangular “full-frame” format that is still the standard today. Focus, please Engineer Oskar Barnack (1) worked for pioneering optical entrepreneur Ernst Leitz (2) when he built the first portable 35 mm camera (3) that became known as the Leica. As photographers awakened to the device’s simplicity and precision, Leica became the camera that snapped the 20th century’s most famous images—including the Red Army’s 1945 capture of Berlin (4) and Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara (5). Leica is still based in Wetzlar, Germany, in this suitably photogenic building (6).

Perspective

Those Iconic Images of Che Guevara and James Dean? Thank a Leica Camera

The pricey but incomparable German device that made photography portable

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara