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L E IC A F O T O G R A F IE IN T E R N AT IO N A L _ S P E CI A L E DI T IO N _ 2 . 2 0 14

SAILOR NURSE KISS

Capturing history for 100 years www.100years.leica-camera.com

Editorial

Content

100 years of Leica_ LFI

Chapter 1: the brand core

Tradition, transformation, innovation

What is behind the Leica legend, how does Leica define itself today – and what does it mean for photographers?

Chapter 2: how the Leica came into being

Oskar Barnack’s epochal invention

DEAR READERS, 100 years of Leica is the celebration of an idea that, from its beginnings, was carried forward by the will to achieve better pictures by means of photography. For Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the Leica, ‘better’ meant ‘simpler for everyone’ in the first place, but in order to achieve this task, stress-free precision in the interaction of all functions and lenses of unimpeachable quality have been critical preconditions. This central theme leads us through the history of the brand, an evolution I have had the pleasure to accompany for quite some time. In recent years, Leica has emerged victorious from several difficult phases of change because the traditional product philosophy with its recognition of the immense importance of precision engineered excellence has reached the boundaries of what was communicable to the market. However, what we are particularly proud of is that Leica has successfully integrated the values that define the identity of the brand – and, incidentally, embrace values that have always been relevant to photography – in products that even today, in the digital age, are of exemplary and unique quality. Let us take the M-System as an example – a more than 60-year old concept, always loved by many photographers and, as is currently the case, flourishing as never before. Join me in this special issue of LFI and let us take a journey to the most important milestones in the history of ‘the Leica’, which today appears in a differentiated form that Oskar Barnack could never have dreamed of. Your Andreas Kaufmann

Ready to shoot 100 years ago, the camera that rang in a new era of imaging culture in 1925: Barnack’s ‘small film camera’

Chapter 3: the Barnack albums

From the life of the Barnack family

An attic-treasure: previously unknown photos from the estate of Oskar Barnack’s granddaughter

Chapter 4: optical excellence

From Elmar to Apo-Summicron

How the art of building Leica lenses developed since the days of Max Berek – the 50 mm lens throughout the years

Chapter 5: the Leica M-System

The almost timeless Leica rangefinder

The M Leica has fascinated lovers of photography since 1954 – the epitome of the precision camera, whether digital or film

Chapter 6: the Leica R-System

An intermezzo: the 35 mm SLR

The R-System once secured Leica’s survival – but lacked the essential features to secure its own

Chapter 7: the Leica S-System

The S-System: “Let’s take the risk …”

How Leica regained the trust of professional photographers – with an extraordinary digital medium format system

Leica M: the contemporary embodiment of rangefinder tradition, with refinements that point the way to the future

LFI _100 years of Leica

Oskar Barnackâ€™s epochal invention In 1914, Oskar Barnack had completed a fully-functional prototype of the camera that was to appear in 1925 as the Leica I and go on to revolutionise the world of photography. Barnackâ€™s motto: small negative, big pictures. The instrument for making them: a combination of precision engineering and high performance optics, thought through to even the tiniest details.

Chapter 2: how the Leica came into being

100 years of Leica_ LFI

A Leica I A with an Elmax 50 mm f/3.5 lens (actual size)

The slim, compact and plain metal-bodied camera with the rounded ends, offering just enough room for a focal plane shutter and fitted with a collapsible 50 mm lens, wasn’t a runaway success from the start. At the Ernst Leitz factory, even the decision to begin its production met with considerable resistance. After all, as the most prominent manufacturer of precision microscopes since the last decades of the 19th century, the company had a reputation to lose. To the company, the toy-like camera, in a previously unknown form and without an established market, appeared to be an incalculable risk. After a heated discussion one day in June 1924, Ernst Leitz II, the company director, swept all doubts aside with the words, “We will take the risk”, and Barnack’s little camera went into production. After all, it was already around half-past twelve – time for lunch. Anyway, many other things also seemed incalculable in the early 1920s. The trauma of World War I, that had destroyed much of Europe with previously unknown brutality, was still being felt. The inflation set in motion by the cost of the war led to the hyperinflation of 1923 and who, if anyone, knew how long the relative stability after the currency reform of 1924 would last? At

With a focal plane shutter and speeds from 1/20th to 1/500th of a second, 35 mm cine film as a medium, incomparable handiness, ideal ergonomics for fast readiness and an outstanding 50 mm lens, the Leica I A was way ahead of its time in 1925

the same time, the burden of reparations lamed the nation and, at Leitz, the core business of manufacturing scientific instruments suffered from the loss of international sales and distribution channels during the war years. Even in the early postwar years after 1918, the company’s recovery was very slow. Nevertheless, instead of reducing the workforce, Leitz preferred to introduce a four-day working week, but this was no long-term solution for the situation. On the other hand, the company could not seriously expect that the invention presented by Oskar Barnack, a precision engineer employed by Leitz since 1911, could significantly compensate for the company’s lost revenues. At least not immediately. It is possible that it was simple intuition, fired by his own practical experiences with Barnack’s prototype on a trip to New York in 1914, that moved Ernst Leitz II to recognise the future potentials of this little camera.

No one could ever have suspected just how epochal his decision would prove to be when the Leica I was presented to the general public at the Leipzig Spring Fair of 1925. Even though photography had established itself in recent decades as one of the most exciting innovations of an era characterised by immense technological upheaval, and had captured the hearts and minds of the masses, no one could really imagine how big pictures with a quality endearing to the eye of the beholder could ever be made from a tiny negative with a size of 24 by 36 mm. After all, in this age of plate cameras, the negative format had always been the picture format. Cultural coincidences. In retrospect, within a period of only five years, Oskar Barnack’s invention was to become the initiator of a leap forward at least as significant in cultural terms as William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative-positive process around 1838 – or as digital photography would be in the 1990s. On the one hand, the reasons lie in favourable timing. The 1920s saw the rise of an enormous variety of mass-circulation illustrated magazines. Alongside the Berliner Illustrirte, founded in 1891, >

LFI _ 100 years of Leica

Chapter 2: how the Leica came into being

Leica III, 1933 (actual size)

enlargements of the pictures it delivered. And it had to be sharp from corner to corner. The latter meant that the usual way at the time could not be employed that the focal length must correspond to the format diagonal, in this case, 43.3 mm. The required imaging performance for such an angle of view of about 53 degrees could not yet be realised, as experience with the Summar had already shown. This also spoke for a 50 mm lens, which eventually became the standard focal length for 35 mm photography. A patent was registered for a 50 mm f/3.5 anastigmat at the end of 1920 – which simultaneously proves how far advanced the development of the camera must have been and how much Ernst Leitz II, who became the sole director of the company on the death of his father in 1920, was expecting it to reach the maturity required for serial production. There is a prototype model (described by Hans-Günter Kisselbach in Barnacks erste Leica, Stuttgart 2008), that must have been constructed quite some time before the first series produced for testing

The fourth leap forward came in 1933, and was embodied by the Leica III, which featured an escapement mechanism for long exposure times. This offered shutter speeds from 1/20th of a second to a whole second, which wereset by a dial on the front of the camera. One year later saw the appearance of the Leica IIIa (bottom), with a shutter speed range extended to 1/1000th of a second

(later called the ‘Nullserie’, the 0-series). It had an Anastigmat lens, an adjustable focal plane shutter and, very important for Barnack, a cassette for changing films in daylight. What’s more, it also already had the dimensions of the camera bodies up to the Leica IIIb. In the opinion of Ulf Richter, ‘This is the camera that deserves the name Ur-Leica’, whereas the Liliput from 1914 (generally described as the Ur-Leica) must be seen as its ancestor.

While the models of the first 0-series from 1923 still required the lens to be capped when cocking the shutter, Barnack solved this problem in the second 0-series in 1924 with a construction that set a time delay between the activation of the curtain roller and the curtain tape drum to achieve a light-tight overlap during the travel of the two shutter curtains. He also refined the mechanism for determining the shutter speeds and this all led to another patent being filed in mid-June of 1924, the final step before serial production could begin. An idea gains ground. By the end of 1925, 903 examples of Barnack’s camera had been delivered. In the first version of the manual, it still bore the name ‘Leca’, but the company soon agreed to change the name to ‘Leica’ (Leitz-camera) to avoid any risk of confusion with a French camera called the ‘L’Éca’. By 1929, this figure had already grown to 16,000 and, at the end of 1931, was to increase again, to over 70,000 cameras. A decisive factor for the dramatic increase in sales around 1930/1931 was the

100 years of Leica_ LFI

introduction of interchangeable lenses. The screw-mount Leica IC, for which focal lengths of 35, 50, 73, 90 and 135 mm became available from 1931, was the first camera to make possible what we take for granted today: the ability to capture different aspects and details of events with a single camera and from the same point – a perfect invitation for courageous photographers of the coming years to experiment and develop radically new visual languages that would become characteristic of the golden age of Leica photography, which lasted until the end of the 1960s. In the years immediately following 1925, the main task was to break new ground for the little camera. Curt Emmermann, from 1931 on publisher of the magazine Die Leica, in a way, the predecessor of LFI, was given the opportunity to test the camera in 1925, and recalled: ‘No matter where I turned up with this camera (…), I caused quite a stir with it in professional circles. People just had no confidence in such a little thing.’ That also applied because cine film as a medium for still picture cameras was just not on the radar, even for film manufacturers like Agfa. They only began to pull together some years later, but then with a vengeance. They didn’t market it as 35 mm film, they called it Leica film, for photography in Leica format. A large format photographer played a significant role in this. Paul Wolff, who was presented with a

The Leica 250 (below) from 1934 – based on the Leica III – was probably the last camera construction to which Oskar Barnack made a significant contribution. The voluminous film chambers were designed for cassettes holding 10 metres of film, sufficient for 250 exposures. ‘There is the news photographer who loses irretrievable moments when forced to insert a new cassette in the middle of the most interesting events, (…) there is the amateur on a holiday trip, or the explorer, who seldom has the opportunity to develop his films on an expedition (…)’ – this is how the brochure explained the logic behind this construction. The camera was not a great success, quite probably because it clearly defeated the concept of the small and elegantly handy camera. Fitted with a motor winder, the Leica 250 was occasionally used for aerial reconnaissance in the Second World War. The same idea, but more graceful and actually rather pretty: the Leica 75 (above), designed for 3 metres of film and 75 exposures. This camera, also known as the ‘Baby 250’, never went into production

Leica for his invaluable contribution to the international photographic exhibition in Frankfurt in 1926, thought it might be a good idea to take it along to his large format commissions and use it to shoot a few snapshots. He got over his initial laments about the poor quality of the film material purely by chance when he stopped the development of an overexposed film after only a short time and suddenly had an almost grainless negative in his hands – simply ideal for enlarging. Paul Wolff was delighted. And his motto, ‘overexpose and underdevelop’, very soon became the mantra of Leica photographers. Wolff’s 40 by 60 prints soon swept aside any remaining misgivings about the quality of the little camera perfected mechanically and optically by the skills of Oskar Barnack and Max Berek – in 1933 at the latest, when Leitz sent Wolff’s big pictures on a worldwide exhibition tour. By then, specialist photo suppliers and even competitors had long since recognised the potentials of the ‘small negative – big picture’ idea. Nevertheless, even that took quite some time. Leitz had always sold its microscopes directly to scientific institutions. At first, connections to photographic suppliers were non-existent, and a sales and distribution network had to be established step by step by dedicated representatives. Slide shows were also introduced as a marketing measure and soon began to attract audiences counted in hundreds. Leitz had launched the compact Uleja projector that was used for the shows in 1926 – only one of numerous accessory products developed by Leitz that were essential for the enduring success of Barnack’s concept against established photographic methods. In addition to projectors, the catalogue from 1931 also contains developing tanks, enlargers and a whole range of accessories for copying and reproduction, with which the Leica was now well on the way to becoming not only a system camera, but rather a universal system solution for all relevant areas of photography. >

LFI _100 years of Leica

Chapter 3: the Barnack albums

On this page: ‘The radio ham’ – Oskar Barnack took this picture of his dog with headphones at some time around 1925. In addition to portraits of Emma and Oskar Barnack, taken around 1907 in Jena, the album page with the handwritten title ‘Hannis Eltern’ (‘Hanni’s parents’) also shows the inventor of the Leica with his self-constructed bicycle. On the next page: Barnack’s decision to buy a car came quite late, as a result of pressure from his family. Daughter Johanna took this picture of him with the car nicknamed ‘Black Peter’ in 1934. Below: the precisionengineer at a lathe, probably taken around 1911 by Nicolaus Befort, the Leitz company photographer at the time. The picture at the far right was probably taken at the Leipzig Spring Fair of 1934, and shows Barnack holding a Leica III with a 50 mm Elmar and a Vidom universal finder (our particular thanks go to Ulf Richter for his assistance in assigning dates to the pictures)

100 years of Leica_ LFI

LFI _100 years of Leica

Chapter 4: optical excellence

Helmut Marx, head of the Leitz lens calculation department at the time, wanted to attempt it anyway. The preliminary work on this project began in 1959/1960. Marx initially experimented with fascinating ideas, for instance, the construction of the outer portion of a lens from four different types of glass. Indeed, a prototype was realised, but the cost for serial production would have been far to high. So he set his sights on asphericals, for the serial production of which neither reference data, nor tools existed.

Welcomed as a sensation, the Noctilux 50 mm f/1.2 was a commercial disaster. Nevertheless, it stayed in production for nine years after its appearance in 1966. In the 1960s, the construction of lenses with apertures of f/1.4 was considered to have been mastered. Yet photographers clamoured for more. It was the heyday of realistic reportage under all thinkable lighting conditions. In 1956, Canon had already launched a 50 mm f/1.2 and, in 1961, a 50 with a maximum aperture of f/0.95. At the same time, Nikon launched a 50 with f/1.1. Leitz – at the time bigger than Canon – wanted to go at least one better – their rivals’ designs were only theoretically usable at their maximum apertures. In 1965, an article stated that the problems of very fast lenses, like spherical aberration and coma, could be eliminated by the use of aspherical lenses. However, it also predicted that their serial production would well remain an illusion.

THE FIRST ASPHERICAL LENS

Top: the Noctilux 50 mm f/1.2, built from 1966 to 1975

Helmut Marx, a pioneer of aspherical technology and computer-aided lens calculation

Within only six months, a special grinding machine had been constructed. A diamond cutting head had to be designed that made it possible to grind the aspherical form within tolerances of 1/1000th of a millimetre. The development of new polishing processes was also required, as conventional methods eliminated the so painstakingly ground aspherical forms. Marx had not only provided the design for the lens, but had also developed the new production methods and, in terms of performance, the effort was more than worthwhile: the aim was the achievement of an image free of reflections and with rich contrast, and the Noctilux 50 mm f/1.2 delivered truly excellent results at maximum aperture that were far superior to those of the other light-gathering titans of the time. Stopped down, it was even better than the Summicron. However, it showed not only a slight shift of focus when stopping down, but also proved to be susceptible to fluctuations in the flange-to-film distance, which led to the recommendation to have it adjusted to match the body on which it would be used. Eventually, this first venture into the world of asphericals turned out to be too complex and costly and, after several years, Walter Mandler was to develop the even faster Noctilux 50 mm f/1.0. Constructed once again exclusively with sphericals, it became truly popular as users discovered its dream-like signature and the aesthetics of creative interaction of gossamer-thin depths of sharp and unsharp planes. What could be achieved by asphericals had now been proved thanks to Marx’ pioneering work and the early 1990s saw the breakthrough in production technology that was to establish asphericals as an integral part of almost any lens design.

100 years of Leica_ LFI

was almost sealed (more on this later) and, as Mandler began his design, its existence was already balanced on a knife edge; something truly spectacular was of the essence, and that with a tight and inflexible development and production budget. No doubt about it, Mandler succeeded on all counts with the Noctilux 50 mm f/1.0 and its construction entirely with spherical lenses. It may well also have played a role in spreading the opinion vehemently voiced by the management at Leitz Canada throughout the company that – no matter how popular the single reflex may be or become – it would be sheer sacrilege to let something as wonderful as the Leica rangefinder system simply quietly die away. And it was a good thing the company listened. The Asph era: the Summilux, the Noctilux and the Apo-Summicron. As we mentioned earlier, some designs last for decades. This is not always because everyone was perfectly satisfied with them, but sometimes because the cost and effort to make any changes would be much too high, and the priorities set were simply somewhere else. As in the case of the Summilux 35 mm f/1.4 from 1960. As the first ever wide-angle lens with such a fast aperture, it was a true classic for available light photography and, stopped down, was hardly any different from the Summicron. Nevertheless, anyone wishing to use it wide open had to tolerate the lower contrast caused by flare and the butterflyshaped rendition of point lights, as is typical for spherical aberration from oblique rays entering the optical system. In terms of correction, this was the end of the road for the double Gauss construction. In the meantime, and not least due to the M6, the M-System had experienced a renaissance and, as large angles of view and fast apertures are amongst the greatest challenges in lens design, at the end of the 1980s Leica took the Summilux 35 as the motivation to try new routes.

Walter Mandler calculated almost 50 lenses for the screw mount Leica and the M and R-Systems. Amongst these were groundbreaking designs like the first 35 mm lens with an aperture of f/1.4, the current Summicron-M 50 mm f/2 and, of course, the Noctilux-M 50 mm f/1.0. Mandler was 23 when he came to Leitz in 1946 and began work in Max Berek’s department, although his only qualification as a lens calculator was his admission, “I’m willing to learn all about it”. He turned out to be a very fast learner. In 1952, Leitz founded a subsidiary in the Canadian town of Midland, Ontario, – in part, to establish a safe haven far from Wetzlar in view of the Cold War, and also to be closer to the important American markets. From 1954 on, Mandler established a second centre of excellence for optical development there that, under his leadership, made a name for itself particularly for the development of cost-effective, computer-aided methods for the design and construction of fast lenses. In the following years, an extremely productive and friendly competition for the production of the best design arose with the counterpart in Wetzlar headed by Werner Marx

The Noctilux-M 50 mm f/1.0, 1975 to 2008

This involved placing a negative element in front of the first and last, positive, elements of the classical double Gauss construction to increase the light flow and extend the options available for correction across the entire image field. Above all, it involved the integration of two aspherical elements. The resulting nine-element lens exceeded all expectations and already delivered high contrast performance at f/1.4 – the only problem was, however, that the asphericals had to be made in the same elaborate way as for the Noctilux 50 mm f/1.2, which, until such a lens was perfect and satisfied all the specifications calculated by the designer, not only took a very long time, but also ran up enormous costs. Built only in small numbers until 1994, the Summilux 35 mm f/1.4 Asph is today a highly coveted collector’s item. Since the early 1990s, the lens design department at Leica, then under the leadership of Lothar Kölsch, had begun to forge ahead with the development of costeffective production methods for their asphericals. In collaboration with Hoya/ Schott and Zeiss, a blank moulding process was developed, which, in combination with special testing procedures based on interferometry, first bore fruit in 1994 in the Summicron-M 35 mm f/2 Asph, followed in 1996 by the Summilux-M 35 mm f/1.4 Asph. Both now had only one aspherical surface, and both proved that aspherical elements made it possible to achieve imaging performance that would have been unimaginable without them, especially under the restrictions of the compact construction of the M-System. Then again, shrinkage effects in the blank pressing process limited the number of glass types that could be used and, in turn, limited the geometries that could be realised. In view of this, the decision was made to continue along the aspherical route and simultaneously invest more in manufacturing technologies which would allow the production of asphericals with arbitrary specifications by grinding. >

LFI _100 years of Leica

concept conceived entirely with practicality in mind. This concept was made absolutely irresistible by simultaneous robustness and finesse in the smooth interaction of all elements of its precisionengineered construction – and enduringly confirmed the reputation of Leitz as the manufacturer of the best precision cameras for 35 mm film. The M3 ideally fulfilled the needs of photographers dedicated to realistic social reportage. Even today, photographers frequently emphasise the advantages of what is seen through the viewfinder of the rangefinder camera. The extended field of view around the bright-line frame marking what will be captured lets the photographer anticipate the development of events and press the shutter release at the decisive moment. Unlike the image as ‘seen’ by a lens and communicated on a focusing screen, the almost life-size scene in the viewfinder of an M3 appears as a

Chapter 5: the Leica M-System

Heinrich Janke (84),seen in his workshop with a bronze depicting Ludwig Leitz. Janke’s artistic oeuvre, whether abstract or, as here, objective, has always been suffused with a will to divine and reveal the inherent essence of an object, a movement or an attitude in a concentrated and intense manner. In his function as the company’s head of design since the end of the 1950s, he also implemented what applies to his oeuvre as a sculptor in his design of the complete brand identity of Leitz Wetzlar. Just don’t come with any ‘styling nonsense’ that has no relation to the function of the product. The face he designed for the Leica M2 became the basis for all subsequent M models

window on the world that promotes a direct and personal interaction between photographer and subject that almost lets the presence of the camera be forgotten. This process of concentration is by no means interrupted by pressing the shutter release, neither acoustically nor otherwise (like the momentary darkening of the viewfinder by the mirror of an SLR, which

would later be used as a differentiating argument against the use of the same). The double-stroke film advance was able to credit itself as an advantage that allowed gentle cocking of the shutter without jerking the camera and disturbing the process of shooting – and gentleness was the reason behind this construction: it was feared that the much faster film advance in comparison to the screw mount cameras could possibly damage the film. As it turned out, this feature was not well-received and motivated the famous Life photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt and David Douglas Duncan to urge Leitz to adapt the proven benefits of the Leicavit rapid winder for the M Leica and also initiated the decision to introduce the single-stroke lever, which appeared in 1958. The M2. The viewfinder of the M3 offered bright-line frames for 50, 90 and 135 mm, whereby the frame for 50 mm was fixed – a

100 years of Leica_ LFI

The M2 from 1958 was given a newly constructed rangefinder with 0.72x magnification which included the bright-line frame for 35 mm lenses that was lacking in the M3

statement favouring the ‘standard lens’ as defined by the Leica I – and the others appeared only when corresponding lenses were mounted. However, news photographers in particular relied on wide-angle lenses, and the viewfinder magnification of the M3 offered insufficient space for appropriate frames. In response, Leitz developed a rangefinder that was, firstly, a less complex construction and, secondly, had a magnification factor of 0.72 that enabled the projection of a 35 mm brightline frame in the viewfinder. In return for this, the frame for 135 mm was omitted. The M2 that appeared in this form in 1958 had also lost the ‘window frames’, which, in the words of Heinrich Janke, ‘also saved 20 minutes in the production process’ and became the basis for all later M models. The M4. The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of M-Photography, but keeping both the M2 and the M3 in the portfolio

soon became a luxury that Leitz could no longer afford: firstly, the culture of rangefinder photography found itself under pressure from the success of SLR cameras like the Nikon F and, secondly, production capacities were tied up by the development of the Leicaflex. Primarily, Leitz responded to the fall in sales of the M with modifications to make it faster: a rapid loading take-up spool, an angled rewind crank in place of the knurled knob, an ergonomically refined wind-on lever and the return of the 135 mm frame. Although all this made the M4, available from 1967, the most versatile M with the most comfortable handling to date, it could not conceal the fact that the rangefinder principle was going out of fashion, despite breakthroughs in the design and construction of super-fast lenses (see page 60). Motor drives, easy use of all imaginable focal lengths without aids like the Visoflex and clip-on viewfinders – all paired with a photographic aesthetic that was less concerned with real life compositions captured in a fleeting moment than with

the creation of visual concepts, for which the focusing screen was far more suitable than the abstractive view through the viewfinder – all this supported the growing hegemony of the single lens reflex camera. In this respect, it is perhaps significant that, in 1972, Henri CartierBresson set his camera aside and returned exclusively to painting and drawing, his original metier in the 1920s. In the coherence of its design, the M4 also seemed to render impossible any further modifications beyond the purely cosmetic. At the time of the Leica M3, the integration of an exposure meter was far from being possible, yet a Leicameter, coupled with the shutter speed dial, could not be the end of this road. The M5. During the development of the M4, Leitz had investigated how throughthe-lens (TTL) metering could be realised, even though it would have meant >

LFI _100 years of Leica

Chapter 6: the Leica R-System

Leicaflex SL2 (1974): a wonderfully bright and clear viewfinder and excellently built – but much too expensive to produce and a dinosaur in comparison with its contemporary rivals with multiple automatic modes

the result that the management sold Correfot off to Minolta, a partner in the SLR sector since the early seventies, and received a number of Minolta lens designs to build up the R-System lens portfolio in exchange. From a strictly financial standpoint, this could well have been the right decision at the time – who knows? While Minolta worked flat out on the development of the AF technology and brought out their first mass-produced autofocus camera in the mid-80s, Leica ‘simply’ carried on with the efforts to emancipate itself from its partner and perfect the manual focus R-System to bring it into line with Leica’s stringent standards. To all intents and purposes, the R8 would have had to have been an autofocus model to avoid being a technological dinosaur in the SLR segment from its launch in

Looking a little like an M with a mirror housing on top – the Leicaflex from 1965

In 1968, the Leicaflex SL also offered throughthe-lens (TTL) exposure metering. And spot metering, an exclusive feature for many years

1996. In fact, the number of contacts on its ROM strip was no coincidence, but the management decided otherwise. The development of the R8 began in 1990, actually before the appearance of the R7 (1992), and its free-form design, intended to explicitly express its heritage as a true Leica, set it apart from all previous R models. The smooth top deck, hiding the typical pentaprism ‘hump’, was a conscious quote

of the design characteristics of the M Leicas and every feature of its ergonomic design was dedicated to manual control of all photographic parameters. This, once again, clearly reveals Leica’s anticyclic stubbornness. Leica bucked the trend towards computerisation and automation

100 years of Leica_ LFI

The Leica R7 (1992): the last of the R models based on the collaboration with Minolta already had numerous attributes unique to Leica and shone with every function available in manual focus single lens reflexes at the time

The R3 (1976, left) began the successful period in the history of Leitz SLRs. Top: the fully mechanical R6 (1987)

of functions in the 1990s – which is anything but popular today – and the consequent minimisation of the photographer’s autonomy. The R8 may have looked bulky, but it was very well balanced, above all for the use of planned heavy zooms, and offered all the metering modes and auto-

matic functions the Leica R cameras had featured since the R4. For the first time, it also offered multi-segment metering and all the latest refinements of microelectronics. Nevertheless, its emphasis on intuitive handling and the reduction of its user interface reflected the essence of the restrained character of the fully-mechanical R6 and R6.2 cameras (1987–2002), which came about as a response to the

wishes of professional photographers for a camera that would function reliably under all conditions. Leica may have expected that the need for a high-end tool with an emphasis on manual functions would endure forever in the SLR segment. This sounded plausible as a profiling strategy and, in the best of all worlds, could well have been a success. Ultimately, however, in view of the requirements of the clientele it targeted, its lack of autofocus turned out to be the criterion that killed the system – long before the hype surrounding digital photography, for which the Digital-Modul-R from 2005 was by all means a creative answer. Apropos tradition: in the perpetuation of the legacy of Oskar Barnack, the fact that Leitz had developed the rangefinder camera to create an instrument with >

LFI _ 100 years of Leica

were already more than enough digital single lens reflex cameras with autofocus in Leica’s traditional domain of 24 × 36 mm photography (see also page 82). If Leica was aspiring to be recognised again as a market-player with the abilities to offer a convincing product to those who earn their livelihood with photography, it meant breaking entirely new ground. Naturally, something like this could not mean the betrayal of a legendary legacy – quite the opposite: the ambitious strategy could only bear fruit if Leica were successful in transferring the charisma of the brand in all its facets as a promise of quality and functionality in a package attractive to professional circles. Intensive discussions with photographers revealed, on the one hand, that for what their clients demand today – for

Chapter 7: the Leica S-System

The technical drawing illustrates the ray path through the S-Lens, conceived from the beginning for the integration of a central shutter, to the mirror, which diverts a portion of the light to the autofocus sensor, and, finally to the pentaprism of the camera that was realised in a battle for the reduction of every possible millimetre. The central shutter (bottom) and its spring mechanism with the function of an energy accumulator is a jewel of precision engineering

instance product or fashion shoots in a wide range of contexts, in the studio or on location, and with the possibility of refining the details of the finished photos as desired – 24 × 36 mm photography had reached its natural limits. What’s more, these discussions revealed that traditional medium format studio equipment was often enough too unwieldy and inflexible. The latter also had to bear the burden of a historic legacy, namely that its lenses were designed for use with roll film. This meant, for example, having to accept a certain ‘built-in unsharpness’ that compensated for the insufficient flatness of larger film formats – despite the breathtaking detail in medium format exposures, a property that had become more and more intolerable in connection with today’s costly digital commissions. All in all, this revealed a tempting opportu-

100 years of Leica_ LFI

Since 2012, the fast lenses of the S-System with focal lengths from 24 to 120 mm have also been available in an alternative version with a central shutter

nity for Leica to plant a new crop on an old field by devising a system that would combine the best of both worlds – of the 24 × 36 mm format and the medium format. A system that would be dedicated to digital in all its components from the very beginning of its development. The performance of its lenses could be attuned from the start to the zero-tolerance characteristics of a sensor and its cover glasses. That Leica had no resources tied up in other professionally oriented systems was an advantage that allowed the creativity of the designers to run free. The 30 by 45 mm sensor – slightly smaller than typical medium formats and which even Oskar Barnack considered the ‘most wonderful aspect ratio’ of 2:3, would support the envisaged construction of a camera compact enough for use in the field

and, what larger formats offered in the way of theoretical advantages in resolution would be more than made up for by the state-of-the-art design of the high-performance S-lenses. It sounds almost like Oskar Barnack’s concept of ‘big pictures from small negatives’. Indeed, Leica actually was able to rely on any number of traditional strengths in the realisation of the S-System concept. Naturally, in lens design, but also in the art of reductionism – the construction of extremely compact systems with a highlyintuitive and inviting interface design that guarantees the sheer pleasure of photography without further explanation, right from the start. What, until now, had never been one of Leica’s core competencies, but, in the past, had been realised with varying success in strategic partnerships, were the areas of system electronics and digital image processing. The ambitious objective to similarly integrate these areas in

the creation of a complete and complex digital system made exclusively with proprietary developments and in line with self-defined quality standards, brought the establishment of entirely new departments in the company – an investment that went far beyond the specific needs of the S-System. The technologies to be developed for this lighthouse project were to break new ground for a fundamental renewal of the entire product portfolio and had to be designed to be scalable to find later use in the fulfillment of the demands of future product families – a resource-conserving platform strategy, ideally adapted to the needs of a medium scale enterprise. Nevertheless, the design specs listed for the constructors of the Leica S were extensive. For example, one task was the development of an autofocus system >