100 Years of Leica

To understand Leica's role and position in photography, we have to paint the picture of its inventor, Oskar Barnack (1879 – 1936). Prior to join Leitz, Barnack was an employee at Zeiss and, as is now almost certain, proposed to the Zeiss managers a concept of the 35mm compact system camera. They didn't show interest and Barnack, being a shy and quiet man just continued with his job. Mechau also worked at Zeiss, but became a Leitz employee to work on cine cameras, then a growing, promising business. Mechau and Barnack met with each other, and Mechau told Barnack about Leitz and the advances in film emulsion technology. Barnack, however, had a fragile health and would stay at Zeiss, as this firm had a good health insurance coverage. But his rise to a higher position was blocked by the decisions of Zeiss managers and then after long hesitation wrote a letter to Leitz. Then the matter was settled quickly. Leitz felt very sympathetic to Barnack, offered him a house on the sunny side of a hill, and good health coverage. In 1911 Barnack started to work for Leitz. The invention of the Leica will presumably never told in detail. Two stories are in vogue. One is that Barnack worked with Mechau on cine apparatus, had to build a small device for testing film speed and exposure, and from that device the Ur-Leica is derived. The other is that Barnack, a keen amateur photographer himself, but of weak health, disliked lugging heavy cameras around in the hills and, falling back on his ideas at Zeiss, developed a small light camera.

The Ur-Leica (the prototype of 1913) and the Leica I (first production model of late 1924) are almost identical to the exposure device. Barnack must have seen the brilliant opportunity to incorporate into the exposure device his germinal ideas for a small camera.

From 1912 to 1924 some prototypes of the Ur-Leica were extensively used by Barnack and Ernst Leitz. The great war from 1914 to 1918 and the subsequent political events generated a bad economical climate for daring business decisions. But in 1924 inflation speeded up, the production of microscopes went down and the Leitz firm was on the brink of firing workers. A new product was desperately needed. The booming world of photography where hundreds of thousands of amateurs were actively taking pictures provided an opportunity. The Barnack camera was already available since 1913. The advisers of Leitz however strongly advised against the production of the Barnack camera. The meeting started at 09:00 hours and Barnack was present. He himself was a quiet man, not a fighter, and he sat in the room silent. The discussion raged for 3 and a half hours, mostly negative. The fate of the camera was now in he hands of one man. Then Ernst Leitz spoke: ”So, it is now 12:30 hours. Let us finish. My decision is to take the risk”.

Barnack’s brainchild was to introduced at the Leipzig fair in the spring of 1925. At first it was called the LeCa (LEitz CAmera) and the very first brochures carry this name. It was quickly changed into “Leica”, which was easier to pronounce. The Leica I had an all-metal body with dimensions 133,7x30,2x55,0 mm and weight of 425 grams. The lens was not interchangeable, had a focal length of 50mm and a maximum aperture of 3,5. The focal plain shutter had speeds of 1/25 to 1/500 sec. The viewfinder was a plain telescope model.

These specifications look very simple to our modern eyes. They are of course, and even in those days the astonished visitors of the fair were skeptical. Four years after its introduction only 4000 Leicas had been sold.

A small negative could never produce the results of a bigger negative, so everybody assumed. From 1928 till the death of Barnack in 1936 the Leitz engineers produced no less than 15 different models, every model in several types.

The most important stages are:

1930: introduction of interchangeable lenses

1931: introduction of standardised interchangeable lenses: before this introduction every lens had to individually matched to the body.

1932: introduction of coupled rangefinder (Leica II)

1933: introduction of the slower speeds till 1 sec (Leica III)

1935: introduction of the fast speed of 1/1000 sec (Leica IIIa)

These additions to the basic body were needed to expand the use of the camera to almost every type of photography. In the same period Leitz introduced an enormous amount of additional accessories to the basic body. From 1936 the Leica could truly be called a system camera, catering for almost every scientific and photographic need.

Its success was to followed up by some very important competitors: the formidable Zeiss Contax, the very popular Agfa Karat and the midrange Kodak Retina. Together they made the base for the revolution of the 35mm photography.

Why? The Leica was a camera designed by inspiration and built by meticulous craftsmen to the precision needed to fulfill the famous Leica claim: small negatives, big enlargements.

But the Leica gave the photographic world much more than just a beautifully designed and carefully built camera. It changed the way photographs were to be taken. When you hold one of the Leicas from the period 1930 to 1940, there is a certain magic flowing out of this camera. Its smallness, but above all its speed of taking a picture inspires one to take pictures in a manner not done before: capturing and freezing the fleeting dynamics of everyday life. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great master of Leica photography, called it the artless art of the snapshot. The ‘snapshot’ as previously defined was a casual picture of the everyday life. But the Leica, with its clear and penetrating viewfinder, its soft and speedy shutter and its superior optics succeeded in capturing life itself.

From a modern point of view, the early lenses for the Leica are quite good, but not of the mythical qualities many Leica devotees attribute to them. The secret of these lenses can only be revealed when looking at the available emulsions in those days. The thick and slow emulsions were designed to cope with all kinds of wrong exposure (the exposure meter then was an unknown quantity). The emulsions were quite coarse grained and therefore very fine details could not be resolved. A lens that did resolve very fine details that could not be recorded by the film gave low image quality as too much background noise would interfere with the visible image. So Max Berek, the designer of the Leica lenses choose an optical formula that suited the characteristics of the emulsions of those days.

The most important demand on the Leica camera was the comparison with a contact print of 6x9cm or 9x12cm (the standard of those days) and the enlargement of the small Leica negative (24x26mm) to the same print area. Barnack and Berek assumed that an enlargement of 13x18cm would be the hardest test for the small Leica negatives and so they designed the precision manufacturing of the whole system to this enlargement factor (5 times the negative area).

The success of the Leica camera (and the competition of Zeiss Contax) however asked for more interchangeable lenses and for higher apertures. The body of the Leica was not designed for heavy lenses and so a new design was needed. A precision miniature camera needs a very high accuracy for the film-to-lens distance and the perpendicularity of the lens flange to the surface of the emulsion. To guarantee this demand the plane of the film should be in one unit with the lens flange. The original Leica has been designed for use with the 50mm f/3,5 l ens only. Faster lenses (f/2,0etc) are also possible to use within the same mechanical tolerances, but heavier lenses put too much strain on the quite flimsy body. Only the IIIc and IIIf are designed for the use of heavy and long focus lenses. Of course with the advent of the M series (1954) this design problem has been completely eliminated.

A realistic appraisal of the Leica camera from its beginnings should take into account that the Leica camera is an evolutionary product. The Leica engineers are quick to see a problem and find a solution. One must realise however that no product has been born perfectly. The Leica comes close to perfection because of drive to perfection from the designers and engineers.

The choice of a classic Leica camera should be made according to a collectors or a users perspective. The collector of course wishes to find a rare or at least an immaculate body to add to his collection. The user who takes pride in using that most prestigious camera body of the prewar period and would like to enjoy image quality of a modern level should be advised to select an old IIIc, even if these particular bodies are not highly valued by collectors.

In the period 1930 to 1940 the world dominance of the coupled rangefinder precision miniature camera has been established, a reign that endured till about 1960. The culmination of the evolution has been reached with the introduction of the Leica M3 in 1954. This model has been steadily improved and its latest incarnation has been shown at Photokina 1998 (the M6 TTL).

Leica cameras in the thirties got strong competition from the Zeiss Contax, a product in many ways superior to the Leica. General opinion now seems to be that the optics of Zeiss were better than the Leica lenses in this period, that the ergonomics of the Leica were better and that mechanically the Contax was more complicated and slightly less durable.

The durability of Leica cameras and its reputation as the best photographic instrument for snapshot based art photography can be seen in the big number of collectors and collector-users.

In the thirties the production of cameras was quite laborious: about 700 parts had to be assembled and adjusted manually to the required tolerances. The mythical smoothness of the handling of the Leica body was not the result of a very sophisticated production technology, but of a very skilled and dedicated workforce. Production runs were short and so many small variations of the same model exist. Engravings changed, the appearance and location of knobs and buttons changed and internally many improvements were made to the shutter and other mechanisms. All these hundreds of small changes have been documented by scores of collectors and no collection seems complete without at least one example of every model and change per model.

As the collectors are paying premium prices for clean and as-new products, it is nowadays almost impossible to find fine examples of Leica cameras for a reasonable price. One has to realise that a Leica camera from the thirties or forties has seen service for at least 40 years. The reliability of the Leica is astonishingly high, partly due to its small number of internal parts, made of material of excellent quality. Still any mechanical product has its tear and wear, the Leica not being an exception. Buying any Leica from that period almost automatically implies additional cost for a clean and lubrication maintenance service. Especially shutter curtains and shutter tension springs are suspect. Expect also some film emulsion debris in the body as the closed shell cannot be cleaned easily. Updated by an expert Leica repair technician, these cameras will function flawlessly for many years to come.

If one wishes to step into the wonderful world of Leica camera and Leica photography the most interesting models are foremost : the Leica II (D):

This is the true Leica screw mount camera: integrated and coupled rangefinder for lenses till 135mm, separate eyepieces for viewing and distance measurement, shutter speeds from 1/20 to 1/500 and the svelte body contours of the immortal Leica. Lenses available for this model range from 35mm to 135mm and included some fast lenses in the 50mm line.
The next important one is the IIIc from 1940. Recognizing the mechanical stress on the body by ever heavier lenses, Leitz engineers lengthened the body by 2,8mm and most important switched to a die-cast body. During the war this model was fitted with inferior shutter curtain material in red. These are very sought after by collectors.The normal black shutter blinds are most common and also better. The IIIc had shutter speeds from 1/30 to 1/1000 and a separate slow speed dial for 1 sec to 1/30sec.

The specifications of this model in fact are almost identical to the specs of the most modern Leica MP.

The lenses.

Leitz and Leica (the firm of Leitz has been bought in 1986 and renamed Leica) has designed and introduced more than 50 lenses for the rangefinder models. The lenses for the Leica can be grouped into three generations. The first generation of optical design runs from 1925 to about 1953. The second generation from 1953 to about 1985. The third generation from 1985 till now. Many people have the opinion that the first generation of Leica lenses is unsurpassed and defines that special Leica quality that collectors and users are raving about. It is true that many of these early lenses are good performers and even today produce adequate image quality. They are however superseded by the newer generations. Especially at full aperture and generally in contrast the older generations are weak. Centre performance is OK but the outer zones again are weak. A detailed analysis of the lenses will be given in a forthcoming article.

The modern Leica’s.

With the M3 the modern period for the Leica rangefinder started. The body was redesigned (first prototype dates from 1936) and the viewfinder became an integrated range/viewfinder construction of unsurpassed clarity and accuracy. Additionally now the viewfinder showed the frames for focal lengths of 50, 90 and 135 mm. Three frames and that is reflected in the ‘3’ of M3. The M is German for “Meßsucher” (Rangefinder).

If you would like to buy into the modern Leica system any M3 or M2 will do. They are relatively cheap if you go for a battered exemplar that will be useless for a collector, but will be very useful for the photographer.

The M line will be discussed in another article.

Conclusion

The Leica in its screwmount incarnation defined the photographic view for many generations., culminating in the art of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Had not an asthmatic and shy, but very creative person be employed (by accident?) by Ernst Leitz who himself was a visionary too, the photographic world would be much poorer indeed.

There is in my opinion too much mythical discussion about the Leica and its qualities. Mechanical and optical the Leica camera set the standard for anyone else. Sometimes however the Leica products have been challenged and sometimes even surpassed. As example one might point to the Canon Vt series which are superior to the older Leica generations from a mechanical point of view. The spirit of the Leica, its smooth and silent functioning, its caring workforce and its inspiring ergonomics have never been equalled. The Leica photographer had that mystical urge to extend the frontier of photographic practice, because he could feel utmost confidence in the optical and mechanical capabilities and qualities of the Leica. This feeling is being shared by any actual user of the Leica rangefinder camera.