Cameras

Leica's Early Years, "Little Negatives Big Pictures"

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Leica, 1920's Germany

Just as films were getting better, making bigger enlargements possible, the Leica camera changed the world. Then, as now, the Leica was made to the highest mechanical standards, all designed to help a photographer take the highest quality photographs in the easiest, least obtrusive way.

Its inventor, Oskar Barnack, developed prototypes as early as 1913, and in 1925, Ernst Leitz introduced the 35mm Leica A, known as the Leica 1 Model A in the United States. In 1935, each of its new interchangeable lenses-both a 35mm wide-angle and 135mm telephoto - turned Leic into a different instrument. "Little Negatives, big pictures," was Barnack's motto.

Here are some of Leica's earliest models that were the trendsetters of the early camera industry.

Leica 1 Model A, 1925

Leica's Early Years, Leica 1 Model A Cameraplex

Leica's Early Years, Leica 1 Model A Cameraplex

Focal Plane Shutter: 1/25 - 1/500                                        Lens: Non Collapsible 50mm f/3.5              Price in 1925: $114

Leica 1 Model B, 1930

Leica's Early Years, Leica 1 Model B Cameraplex

Leica's Early Years, Leica 1 Model B Cameraplex

Rim-Set Compur Leaf Shutter: 1/1 - 1/300

Leica II Model D, 1932

Leica's Early Years, Leica 2 Model D Cameraplex

Leica's Early Years, Leica 2 Model D Cameraplex

Built in Coupled Rangefinder Built in Yellow Filter Optional: Remote Film Advance/Shutter Release Price in 1932: $56

Leica Single Exposure, 1936

Leica's Early Years, Leica Single Exposure Cameraplex

Leica's Early Years, Leica Single Exposure Cameraplex

Designed for Film Testing Tiny View Camera Price in 1936: "OLIGO" Model $31.50, "OLORA" Model $12.75

Part of Leica's appeal came from the very idea of the "candid camera." Erich Salomon (1886 - 1944) first used a handheld model, the Ermanox, to photograph German high society as Hitler was gaining power.

Before long Alfred Eisenstadt and Henri Cartier-Bresson were using Leicas to make pictures of scenes such as V-J Day kisses in Times Square and street life in paris. The cumbersome Speed Graphic with its powerful flash was still an awesome weapon for news photographers covering Hollywood openings and shooting crime scenes. But the Leica ratified the 35mm format.

In the 1960s, German, American, and especially Japanese camera companies gradually substituted the single-lens reflex format for the rangefinder system.

Production was streamlined and camera prices lowered. By marketing their cameras to affluent amateurs, companies such as Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Asahi Pentax, and Minolta grew the business. Meanwhile films, newspapers, lenses, and processes all improved - each significant innovation serving as a "force multiplier" to drive camera sales, spur film and print consumption, and propel a growth curve that implied permanent prosperity. . .

Text from Gustavson, Todd. "Camera". New York: Fall River Press, 2009

'Memory Unearthed' The Lodz Ghetto Photographs

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The Lotz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross

I spend some time with this book over the weekend and found an excerpt I felt worthy of sharing. The book itself is immensely powerful in both photographic aesthetic and historical significance. For 3 years during WWII, photographer Henryk Ross documented the Nazi expansion into the second largest jewish ghetto in Poland, the Łódź Ghetto.

Cover, Memory Unearthed

Cover, Memory Unearthed

 Purchase: 'Memory Unearthed' | $29.42

Memory Unearthed

Book Summary

From 1941 to 1944, the Polish Jewish photographer Henryk Ross (1910–1991) was a member of an official team documenting the implementation of Nazi policies in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. Covertly, he captured on film scores of both quotidian and intimate moments of Jewish life. In 1944, he buried thousands of negatives in an attempt to save this secret record. After the war, Ross returned to Poland to retrieve them. Although some were destroyed by nature and time, many negatives survived.

Memory Unearthed presents a selection of the nearly 3,000 surviving images—along with original prints and other archival material including curfew notices and newspapers—from the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Ross’s images offer a startling and moving new representation of one of humanity’s greatest tragedies. Striking for both their historical content and artistic quality, his photographs have a raw intimacy and emotional power that remain undiminished.

Creation by Omission

In the film industry it's an editors job to create by omission.Much like a sculptor, an editor takes the materials and mediums given to him/her and removes all that is not conducive to the final vision. An editor has the ability to manipulate time, while a photographer has the ability to freeze it. Both using their artistry to sculpt a story.

As an editor and a photographer for over a decade, I found a passage in this book that particularly stood out. Here is an excerpt from Memory Unearthed page 176 that really details these points quite eloquently:

"By choosing a moment in time, the photographer is rejecting all other moments, whether past or future. Photography is an editing medium. When a photographer frames up an image, he is editing reality - excluding everything below the frame line, everything above it and all to the right and left.

Significance is ascribed only to what is bounded by the four edges of the frame. It's like pointing, but more precise and permanent. And it has more authority...

... A painter can seduce with a glistening brush stroke; a photographer has only form, content and time. Photography has an apparent facility, but doing brilliantly - being original and telling a story well - is a major challenge.

Discover Your Story

michaelangelo chapel Cameraplex

michaelangelo chapel Cameraplex

I think the art of storytelling within photography can best be summed up by High Renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni:

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free - Michelangelo

So next time you pick up your camera, understand the potential power of your work. Paint your picture, carve your stone, and unearth you story.