Eamonn McCabe
Now that we all carry cameraphones in our pockets, it’s hard to imagine that the biggest breakthrough in photography actually happened back in 1914 – when Oskar Barnack invented the Leica.
Suddenly, photographers could throw away their heavy tripods and exploding flashguns, and step out of their studios to walk the streets and take photographs with this new mobile camera.
Barnack, a German optical engineer who specialised in microscope research, was also a keen amateur photographer, but his health was poor and he couldn’t carry the heavy cameras of the time. He quickly turned his prototype Ur-Leica into a lasting success. By 1932, there were 90,000 cameras. By 1961, a million cameras were in use.
Anyone who is anyone in photography has used the “miniature miracle”, as it was known at the time – from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Capa, Magnum’s great war photographer. More recently, Sebastião Selgado used his Leica to shoot an extraordinary series of images of Brazilian gold mines. William Eggleston, known for his large-scale colour-saturated prints of everyday life, is an obsessive collector: he has more than 300 Leicas and has shot most of his negatives, now numbering some 1.5m, on them. He keeps them all in customised leather cases. How does he ever choose which one to use?
Bruce Davidson, another Magnum photographer, has always used Leica cameras: “For me, the things that define the Leica mystique are that it’s small, it’s relatively light, it’s quiet and unobtrusive and they don’t look like cameras,” he said in an interview on Leica’s blog. “For example, right now I’m thinking about doing something where I want to walk around the streets. I want to be very invisible and not aggressive in any way. That means quiet, and that means Leica.”
People who own them swear by them. Some have their Leicas locked up in bank vaults and many watch the value of their cameras soar as photographers become disillusioned with digital photography.
Milestones in their development include the rangefinder cameras like the legendary Leica M3 (in 1954) and the M6 (in 1984), a Fleet Street favourite. At the same time, Leica lenses were beginning to be known as some of the sharpest lenses around and Leica binoculars were also wowing the world.
The R-System, an SLR camera that many Leica M users never came around to, kicked off in 1976 with the Leica R3 – their first electronic camera. In the late 1980s, they introduced their first point-and-shoot model first digital camera, the Leica Digilux.
Leica has become photography’s badge of style – though not everyone knows how to use them properly. As Mr Holve, a camera blogger, told the New York Times, Leica aficionados can be divided into two groups: shooters and carriers. “Carrying a Leica around can be a little like driving a Bentley,” Mr Holve said. “Just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you’re a good driver.”
