One hundred years ago this month, at a trade fair in Germany, an optical-instrument company from a small town near Frankfurt quietly launched a novel little product that one of its engineers, Oskar Barnack, had been working on for more than a decade.
E. Leitz and Co. gave the Leica miniature camera barely any space at its booth alongside its range of serious microscopes and the like. It had become the pet product of the 54-year-old second-generation head of the family company, Ernst Leitz II, but was regarded skeptically by many of the older men on the board.
A lot of serious photographers, too, regarded the Leica 1 Model A as little more than a toy, as it used a thin strip of 35-mm. movie film instead of the customary inches-wide photographic plates. The new camera’s opponents had a point, because the black-and-white film of the day was too grainy to be blown up into prints of any size.
Another drawback, from the naysayers’ point of view: the gimmicky (although solidly engineered) Leica camera, seemingly useless for anything more than tiny snapshots, was priced at around $75 at a time when a Kodak Box Brownie cost $2 and a pro photographer could have a proper Speed Graphic press camera for $100.
It was not until seven years later, when the second iteration of Leica cameras came out and the company gave them to selected journalists as a marketing stunt, that serious photographers began to see that a pocket-size camera was actually rather good for reportage and street photography.
The senior remaining member of the Leitz family, Knut Kühn-Leitz, Ernst Leitz II’s great-nephew and a former managing director of the company, still lives in Leica’s hometown, Wetzlar, where, in 2014, he invited this writer to his elegant town house to discuss how Leica arrived at just the right cultural moment.
“The great illustrated picture magazines in Munich and Berlin were just getting going, so there was a cultural demand for people to be able to see things vicariously,” said Kühn-Leitz. “They didn’t want to read so much, but to see pictures.”
In almost no time, Leica became the pre-eminent camera company. By the mid-1930s the cameras were used by nearly every great photographer of the era: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, André Kertész, Ilse Bing, and even filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to some extent. Later, they became a favorite of photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, Sebastião Salgado, William Eggleston, and Annie Leibovitz, who began to use Leicas for her personal and travel photography.
Many, if not most, of the best-known black-and-white photos of the past century were taken with Leica cameras: Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, Yevgeny Khaldei’s photo of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square, Dennis Stock’s picture of James Dean in the same location, Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss, Alberto Korda’s shot of Che Guevara, Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl, and dozens more images that are so well known they’ve almost become clichés.
An indication of the near cult status Leica has achieved came from Cartier-Bresson, when he said in a 1971 interview, “Shooting with a Leica is like a long tender kiss, like firing an automatic pistol, like an hour on the analyst’s couch.” One of the most hyperbolic—not to mention French—things ever said, but the emotion behind it can be chalked up to him approaching the end of his career.
Today, the cult of Leica does not even pretend not to be a cult. At the company’s camera-shaped headquarters–cum–museum–cum–factory–cum–theme park in Wetzlar, opened in 2014, fans who come on a Leica hajj can buy Leica-branded coffee beans, wine, Steiff bears, caps, and key rings, and watch from behind glass (but strictly not photograph) new cameras being built by hairnetted employees.
They can then go for a coffee and cake in the Leica café, take a hike on a Leica nature trail, perhaps have a schnapps in the Oskar Barnack bar, and spend a night or two in the Leitz Hotel, where the rooms have Leica-themed wallpaper.
Naturally, there’s also a store that sells both the latest Leicas and a selection of older specimens. Antique Leicas are extremely sought after, and the rarest and most storied fetch huge prices at auction. The battle-scarred Leica III that Yevgeny Khaldei used for his Reichstag picture was sold by Bonhams in Hong Kong for $200,000 in 2014. Prices have rocketed since then—a pre-production prototype from 1923 sold for $15.1 million in 2022.
There are few German companies that don’t have an awkward 1933-to-1945 period in their history to explain, but Leica managed to be a thorn in the Nazis’ side even as Hitler’s armed forces used its products. Ernst Leitz II described the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) troops as “brown apes,” and the company was proud to hire Jewish workers while they could.
Later, Leica helped Jewish employees and their families—along with other Wetzlar Jews who didn’t work for Leica—escape the Holocaust by sending them to New York as “employees.” In many cases, the jobs they were ostensibly leaving for didn’t exist. To this day, there are dozens of descendants of the “Leica Freedom Train” living in the U.S.
The story goes that the local Gestapo wanted to round up the Leitz family as traitors but were overruled by Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who said Leitz’s contribution to the war effort was too important to close the company down. Another story that’s never been confirmed is that Leitz deliberately made optical products such as aircraft bombsights “a little bit off,” so German bombers would miss their targets.
Ernst Leitz II never spoke publicly about the Nazi period and said almost nothing about it, even to his children. “From Ernst Leitz’s point of view,” one friend of the family has said, “he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position. The Leitz credo was ‘Do good, but do not speak about it.’”
So, what makes Leicas so special, apart from being status symbols? (I was present in the London Leica Store when a Chinese tourist bought 10 M-Series cameras plus a set of lenses for each. The total bill was $440,000. He told me they were presents for his family.) A lot of devotees argue that merely holding a Leica, even one from the not-very-user-friendly, flagship M-Series, drives you to take a certain type of picture—thoughtful, naturalistic, and almost poetically composed.
Objectively, though, some of the things we Leica fans—Cartier-Bresson included—say can be a little florid. A wonderful Hamburg photographer, Samuel Lintaro Hopf, has even made a mocking but affectionate video entitled “Shit Leica Owners Say.” “I always consider my Leica like a Stradivarius” and “You don’t really experience the real world until you have a Leica” are two standout contributions.
Today, the Leica look is defined by a kind of glow and luminosity. Even photos taken with digital Leicas, which account for the entire range apart from one model, the film-only M6 ($5,995 plus lens), look as if they were taken on film.
On my visit to Wetzlar in 2014, I spoke with Tom Stoddart, the brilliant photojournalist, who died in 2021. Stoddart was a no-nonsense British northeasterner, and if anyone would be able to explain sensibly Leica’s appeal, it was Tom.
“I’m completely non-technical,” he said. “When I first worked in Fleet Street, I used the same equipment as the rest of the guys, a zoom with a flash and all that. Then I discovered the M-Series Leica, and it was like a revelation. It gives you total simplicity. A camera is just a box with a hole in it, and you make great pictures with your head and your heart.
“With a little, discreet Leica, I can hunt moments. I’ve watched film of Cartier-Bresson stalking moments in a street in Paris, and it was beautiful. It’s almost balletic, and if that sounds pretentious, well, it is what shooting with these amazing cameras is like.”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
