F/8 by Jack Xü

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ÂŠ 2020 by Jack Tianjian Xu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the designer Xu. Design by: Jack Tianjian Xu, Art Center College of Design Cover Design by: Jack Tianjian Xu Instructed by: Stephen Serrato Typeface Used: Palatino, Courier Printing: Typecraft, Wood and Jones, Inc. Binding: Kater Crafts Bookbinders First Edition Printed in Pasadena, CA

Hans-Michael Koetzle

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o-Series Leica, 1923

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WITNESS TO A CENTURY It is a statement of fact, without exaggeration. The Leica system, consolidated in the second half of the 1950s as the most precise and reliable, reached its apotheosis, its true perfection, in the next decade, when it was recognized as the ideal choice for photojournalism, snapshots, and action pictures in general. This was the case despite the arrival on the market of the Japanese single-lens reflex cameras, which notably reduced the commercial maneuvering room available to Leitz. As unlikely as it might seem today, the factor behind the continued success of the rangefinder Leica was its viewfinder with the framelines. Unlike the view with a reflex camera, in which one sees only what is framed (and there is that split-second blackout period between one picture and the next, which prevents the photographer from following the scene), in the Leica one sees more than what one photographs, the entire scene is always present, and there are no dark moments between one photo and the next.

WITNESS TO A CENTURY

Those who use a Leica “know” that all this is true, Those who discover it, become aware of it very soon. The approach of the future is always a disquieting reality. For a good reason: even the period we are living in demands to be judged and understood, is ready to make its way into history. The situation calls for a certain amount of discretion since looking back on the twentieth century almost all the events seem important. In this last chapter we have decided to hold tight to the theme that has brought us here: the representation of a century through the life of people, rich and poor, in peace and in war, West and East ... which is also the reason why, despite all the changes in style related to the chaotic pace of technology, the Leica M , with its viewfinder with framelines, continues to hold its place. The Leica is the only camera that puts you down in the middle of the situation, that asks you to see the world from close up—just as Robert Capa held that war, to be described should be photographed with a wide-angle lens. The idea is valid not only for war but for any social event. It is no mere coincidence that in the year 2000 Leica presented a new edition of the O-Series, the 1914 prototype with which Barnack took the first pictures. And this was not a camera to put in a glass case. Today, as in the past, it is a camera to put around your neck and use to take pictures. The ThÜringer Wald near Wetzlar; the German Empire in the year 1905. A man in a light-colored suit and hat struggles slowly toward the top of a hill. Behind him rises the smokestack of the Optische Werke Ernst Leitz factory. When he reaches the top he opens the tripod of an

awkward plate camera with leather bellows. The day is unusually warm, and his asthma is giving him no peace. He takes all eight images on the plates contained in a large leather case. Then he looks at the camera and tries to imagine it smaller—a great deal smaller, and without the tripod. He goes further and imagines it fits in his pocket, and without plates, but loaded instead with film like the kind used in the movies. And he asks himself: But what would I take photos of? Oskar Barnack, the next day, asks for a meeting with his boss, the entrepreneur Ernst Leitz, already world famous for microscopes and telescopes. “I have an idea. If we could ...” “Go on, let me see.” Thus was born the Leica. And with it a new way of telling the story of the world with images. Without it, the twentieth would have been a truly shortsighted century. How much was a Leica worth at the end of World War II? The price was set on the black market. The camera’s official price was between 300 and 600 marks, but if you found someone who wanted it, you might get as much as 42,000. Which, at black market prices, would also buy 6,000 American cigarettes. If you found a farmer with a nicotine habit, your meals would be guaranteed for quite a while ... Life in postwar Germany went along that way, based on an economy of bartering. Even Wetzlar had been bombed and occupied by American forces. In the midst of disaster, the Leitz factory

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had not been damaged. Germany was in need of everything, including Leicas, and production started up again, first slowly then steadily. By the beginning of the 1950s, Barnackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s camera was again an object of desire. Europe was embracing the automobile, including the pleasure of Sunday outings, and everyone wanted to bring home an enduring souvenir. The age of images was making its start. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Leica occupied a position of enormous prestige among photographers, who by then had learned the wonderful qualities of that handy and precise camera. But destiny is blind, and the tools men make are themselves innocent. From September I, 1939, until the end of the war, the Elmar and Hektor lenses no longer opened on the smiling faces of girls and children, they no longer transferred to film the discovery of the world seen from above and from every other possible angle or reflection. Instead, they opened to document images of armed men, Panzer tanks and bombers, the advance and then the inglorious retreat of the Nazi swastika, with scenes of destruction in the middle. As humanity deserved, the war finally ended, and the joy of peace returned, along with the joy of life. And life once again became the subject to he photographed, and just as it really is, without assuming poses, so as to take its rightful place in the album of personal and collective memories. The appearance of the Leica revolutionized the way of portraying life, accelerating the speed of seeing the surrounding world and fixing it to film. Among the first to become aware of the enormous potentials of the new camera was a

German photographer, today recently rediscovered, Paul Wolff. His large-format (30Ă&#x2014;40 cm) prints and his photography books with surprising color images fascinated the public and made an important contribution to the consolidation of Leicaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success. The crisp, almost geometrical style of his images met with great favor in Europe, and most of all in Germany, for people found in his images the serenity that the difficult years following World War I had canceled. But the Leica was a true world citizen, easily making its way across all borders. During those same years it showed up in flight aboard zeppelin dirigibles, in Moscow in the hands of Rodchenko, and in Paris in those of Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson; it appeared in a leading role in the last great peaceful event of the 1930s, the Berlin Olympics, where it was used without political bias by Leni Riefenstahl.

As “Queen of the Leica,” the German-born photographer Ilse Bing pioneered the use of the new 35mm camera in Paris. Along with Brassaï, Man Ray, Henri CartierBresson, Dora Maar, and Florence Henri, Bing played a key role in making the City of Light the capital of avant-garde photography. Forced into exile by the war, Bing moved to New York, where she put down her camera for good in 1959. Her work was rediscovered in the 1970s, when it was again featured in landmark exhibitions. She died in 1998 when she was nearly ninety-nine years old. Her 1931 Self-Portrait with Leica is now an icon of modern photography.

“I didn’t choose photography; it chose me. I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first then do it, he is driven.”

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ILSE BING

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ILSE BING

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ILSE BING

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup, France. A pioneer in photojournalism, Cartier-Bresson wandered around the world with his camera, becoming totally immersed in his current environment. Considered one of the major artists of the 20th century, he covered many of the world biggest events from the Spanish Civil War to the French uprisings in 1968.

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“The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.”

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HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: ‘THERE ARE NO MAYBES’ By The New York Times Jun. 21, 2013

In 1971, Sheila Turner-Seed interviewed Henri Cartier-Bresson in his Paris studio for a film-strip series on photographers that she produced, with Cornell Capa, for Scholastic. After her death in 1979 at the age of 42, that interview, along with others she had conducted, sat like a time capsule in the archives of the International Center of Photography in New York. That is, until 2011, when Ms. Turner-Seed’s daughter, Rachel Seed, learned of their existence and went to I.C.P. to study the tapes. It was a profound experience for her, since she was 1 when her mother died and did not remember her voice. Ms. Seed, herself a photographer, has been working on a personal documentary, “A Photographic Memory,” about a daughter’s search for the mother she never knew through their shared love of photography. She is raising money with a Kickstarter campaign. The second part of that interview, transcribed from tape by Sheila Turner-Seed, continues where we left off yesterday. It has been lightly edited. A DVD of the Cartier-Bresson interview, with his photos, is available from the International Center of Photography’s online bookstore.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

S.T. Have you ever really been able to define for yourself when it is that you press the shutter? H.C. It’s a question of concentration. Concentrate, think, watch, look and, ah, like this, you are ready. But you never know the culminative point of something. So you’re shooting. You say, “Yes. Yes. Maybe. Yes.” But you shouldn’t overshoot. It’s like overeating, overdrinking. You have to eat, you have to drink. But over is too much. Because by the time you press, you arm the shutter once more, and maybe the picture was in between.

partridge. Maybe the others are gone by then. But I see people wrrrr, like this with a motor. It’s incredible, because they always shoot in the wrong moment. S.T. Can you bear to talk a bit about your equipment? H.C. I am completely and have always been uninterested in the photographic process. I like the smallest camera possible, not those huge reflex cameras with all sorts of gadgets. When I am working, I have an M3 because it’s quicker when I’m concentrating. S.T. Why the 50-millimeter lens?

France, Paris, 1989

Very often, you don’t have to see a photographer’s work. Just by watching him in the street, you can see what kind of photographer he is. Discreet, tiptoes, fast or machine gun. Well, you don’t shoot partridges with a machine gun. You choose one partridge, then the other

H.C. It corresponds to a certain vision and at the same time has enough depth of focus, a thing you don’t have in longer lenses. I worked with a 90. It cuts much of the foreground if you take a landscape, but if people are running at you, there is no depth of focus. The 35 is splendid when needed, but extremely difficult to use if you want precision in composition. There are too many elements, and something is always in the wrong place. It is a beautiful lens at times when needed by what you see. But very often it is used by people who want to shout. Because you have a distortion, you have somebody in the foreground and it gives an effect. But I don’t like effects. There is something aggressive, and I don’t like that. Because when you shout, it is usually because you are short of arguments.

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If you have little equipment, people don’t notice you. You don’t come like a show-off. It seems like an embarrassment, someone who comes with big equipment. And photo electric cells in a camera—I don’t see why it is done. It is a laziness. During the day, I don’t need a light meter. It is only when light changes very quickly at dusk or when I’m in another country, in the desert or in the snow. But I guess first, and then I check. It is good training. S.T. In some sense, you impose your own rules that are like disciplines for yourself, then. H.C. For myself—I’m not speaking for others. I take my pleasure that way. Freedom for me is a strict frame, and inside that frame are all the variations possible. Maybe I’m classical. The French are like that. I can’t help it! Photography as I conceive it, well, it’s a drawing—immediate sketch done with intuition and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s the next picture. But life is very fluid. Well, sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, “Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.” Life is once, forever. S.T. How do you feel about color photography? H.C. It’s disgusting. I hate it! I’ve done it only when I’ve been to countries where it was difficult to

go and they said, “If you don’t do color, we can’t use your things.” So it was a compromise, but I did it badly because I don’t believe in it. The reason is that you have been shooting what you see. But then there are the printing inks and all sorts of different things over which you have no control whatsoever. There is all the interference of heaps of people, and what has it got to do with true color? S.T. If the technical problems were solved and what you saw on the page would really be what you saw with your eyes, would you still object? H.C. Yes, because nature gives us so much. You can’t accept everything of nature. You have to select things. It’d rather do paintings, and it becomes an insoluble problem. Especially when it comes to reportage, color has no interest whatsoever except that people do it because it’s money. It’s always a money problem. There are some very good young photographers. They want to do photographic essays and there is no market for it. In 1946, when we started Magnum, the world had been separated by the war and there was a great curiosity from one country to know how the other was. People couldn’t travel, and for us it was such a challenge to go and testify—I have seen this and I have seen that. There was a market. We didn’t have to do industrial accounts and all that.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Magnum was the genius of Bob Capa, who had great invention. He was playing the horses and the money paid for the secretaries. I came back from the Orient and asked Capa for my money and he said, “Better take your camera and go work. I have taken your money because we were almost in bankruptcy.” I kept on working. Now it is a very big problem because there are hardly any magazines. No big magazine is going to send you to a country because everybody has been there. It’s another world. But there are heaps of specialized magazines who are going to use your files. And you can make quite a decent living just by files. But it means you have to add pictures for years and years. For a young photographer to start is quite a problem nowadays. There are necessities of life, and everything is getting more expensive in a consumer society. So the danger is that photography might become very precious—“Oh, a very rare print.” There’s not a very real place for it. But what does it mean? That preciousness is a sickness. Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money. I think a print should be signed. That means a photographer recognizes that the print has been done either by him or according to his own standards. But a print is not like an etching, where the plate wears out. A negative doesn’t wear out.

S.T. Perhaps the only lead that photographers had was to imitate painters, and they still have to learn their own identity. H.C. Yes. Why be embarrassed? We are not what you call “misfit painters.” Photography is a way of expressing ourselves with another tool. That’s all. S.T.t Can we go back to something we were discussing earlier? What is it like to return to a country you have visited before? Is there a difference between the first time and when you return? H.C. I like very much going back to a country after a while and seeing the differences, because you build up impressions, right or wrong, but always personal and vivid, by living in a country and working. You accumulate things and leave a gap, and you see the changes strongly when you’ve been away for a long time. And the evolution in a country is very interesting to measure with a camera. But at the same time, I am not a political analyst or an economist. I don’t know how to count. It’s not that. I’m obsessed by one thing, the visual pleasure. The greatest joy for me is geometry; that means a structure. You can’t go shooting for structure, for shapes, for patterns and all this, but it is a sensuous pleasure, an intellectual pleasure, at the same time to have everything in the right place. It’s a recognition of an order which is in front of you.

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The difference between a good picture and a mediocre picture is a question of millimeters— small, small differences—but it’s essential. I didn’t think there is such a big difference between photographers. Very little difference. But it is that little difference that counts, maybe. What is important for a photographer is involvement. It’s not a propaganda means, photography, but it’s a way of shouting what you feel. It’s like the difference between a tract for propaganda and a novel. Well, the novel has to go through all the channel of the nerves, the imagination, and it’s much more powerful than something you look at and throw away. If a theme is developed and goes into a novel, there is much more subtlety; it goes much deeper. Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict—a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living. You have to forget yourself. You have to be yourself and you have to forget yourself so that the image comes much stronger—what you want by getting involved completely in what you are doing and not thinking. Ideas are very dangerous. You must think all the time, but when you photograph, you aren’t trying to push a point or prove something. You don’t prove anything. It comes by itself.

If I go to a place, it’s not to record what is going on only. It’s to try and have a picture which concretizes a situation in one glance and which has the strong relations of shapes. And when I go to a country, well, I’m hoping always to get that one picture about which people will say, “Ah, this is true. You felt it right.” That’s why photography is important, in a way, because at the same time that it’s a great pleasure getting the geometry together, it goes quite far in a testimony of our world, even without knowing what you are doing. But as for me, I enjoy shooting a picture. Being present. It’s a way of saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” It’s like the last three words of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which is one of the most tremendous works which have ever been written. It’s “Yes, yes, yes.” And photography is like that. It’s yes, yes, yes. And there are no maybes. All the maybes should go to the trash, because it’s an instant, it’s a moment, it’s there! And it’s respect of it and tremendous enjoyment to say, “Yes!” Even if it’s something you hate. Yes! It’s an affirmation.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

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HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

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HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Robert Capa, one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century and a founding member of the Magnum photographic agency, had the mind of a pasionate and committed journalist and the eye of an artist. His lifework, consisting of more than 70,000 negative frames, constitues an unparalleled documentation of a crucial twenty-two-year period (1932-1954) encompassing some of the most catastrophic and dramatic events of the last century.

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“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”

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ROBERT CAPA

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ROBERT CAPA

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ROBERT CAPA

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Eisenstaedt became known to millions worldwide through his work for LIFE Magazine, which he joined as one of the first four staff photographers in 1935 (when it was still Project X). His 86 covers and over 2500 assignments for LIFE have portrayed the earth-shaking events and influential people of the twentieth century, from the dignity of royalty to the elegance of movie stars, from the passion of scholars to the determination of diplomats. John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and Winston Churchill are just a few of the luminaries captured forever through Eisenstaedtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unfailing ability to seize the fleeting essence of the moment.

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“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”

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ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

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ALFRED EISENSTAEDT

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Elliott Erwitt was born in 1928 in the beautiful city of France, Paris. When he was ten in 1939, his family originally from Russia shifted to the United States. There, from the New School for Social Sciences and Los Angeles City College, Erwitt learned photography and filmmaking until 1950. During the same decade, Erwitt worked as an assistant photographer.

A subject that Erwitt has extensively covered is dogs. They have been the focus of four books by him, including Elliott Erwittâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dogs, 2008; Woof, 2005; Dog Dogs, 1998; and Son of Bitch, 1974. The title of the earliest book is quite interesting and humorous. Erwitt described dogs as funny in some situations and as having a few qualities of human beings.

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“I’ll always be an amateur photographer.”

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ELLIOTT ERWITT

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ELLIOTT ERWITT

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ELLIOTT ERWITT

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Marc Riboud is born in 1923 in Lyon, France. At the Great Exhibition of Paris in 1937 he takes his first pictures with the small Kodak Vest-Pocket his father offered him. Numerous museums trough Europe, as well as United States, China and Japan regularly show his work. He received many awards, among which two Overseas Press Club, the Time-Life Achievement, the Lucie Award and the ICP Infinity Award.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.â&#x20AC;?

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MARC RIBOUD

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MARC RIBOUD

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MARC RIBOUD

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement. And his commitment to the Russian Revolution subsequently encouraged him to abandon first painting and then fine art in its entirety, and to instead put his skills in the service of industry and the state, designing everything from advertisements to book covers. His lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work was a ceaseless experiment with an extraordinary array of media, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and photography.

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“Future is our only objective.”

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ALEXANDER RODCHENKO

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ALEXANDER RODCHENKO

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ARTIST NAME GOES HERE

SebastiĂŁo Salgado was born on February 8, 1944, in AimorĂŠs, Brazil. After an early career as an economist, he decided to become a photographer in the 1970s. Salgado has earned fame for his stark photos of people coping with the effects of poverty, famine, industrialization and political oppression. He has published several books and has received awards for his socially conscious photojournalism.

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“It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.”

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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO’S JOURNEY FROM BRAZIL TO THE WORLD By Larry Rohter Mar. 23, 2015

Sebastião Salgado has won every major prize a photographer can receive, with his crisp, compassionate black-and-white images, many of them from war zones and other locations of human suffering, hanging on the walls of museums, galleries and private collections around the world. His books, including Workers, Migrations, Sahel and, most recently, the nature-oriented Genesis, have consistently met with commercial and critical success. Now, as if to complete the picture, a documentary film about Mr. Salgado, 71, and his work is about to opens in theaters across the United States. The Salt of the Earth, a collaborative effort between the German director Wim Wenders, who is also a photographer, and Mr. Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, was nominated for the Oscar for best documentary film, won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and last month was also awarded a César, the French equivalent of an Academy Award. Nowadays, although “my vision of the human being has not changed, I no longer think just of my own species,” Mr. Salgado, speaking in Portuguese, said in a telephone interview from his studio in Paris last month. “That’s not my only preoccupation. Today I think of the other species too, of the ants, the termites, the whales, they are as important as my own. The behavior of our species, what we do to nature, to other species, to each other, is awful, so I have the same skepticism about us that I always had.” That broadened interest in environmental concerns is documented in detail in The Salt of the Earth, which shows him working on the Genesis project in locales as far-flung as the Amazon, the Arctic and New Guinea and also accompanies him as he tries to undo the environmental degradation afflicting his native region through a foundation he set up for that purpose, the Instituto Terra. Mr. Salgado talked about those and other subjects with Larry Rohter. Their conversation has been edited.

SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

L.O. You’ve largely avoided movies in the past. What made you willing to do this documentary film? Was it because your son was involved? S.S. It wasn’t a decision taken easily in the beginning. Juliano had always wanted to do the story of his family, he’s the child of immigrants, we came here to Paris and in the beginning we were kind of refugees, it was during the time of the Brazilian dictatorship, and we remained here. You must have seen the film and noted that my father is in it. That was done around 1998 or 1999, when Juliano was very young, just starting to do cinema.

heritage from having been an economist. The economics I did was not the economics of business administration, it’s not micro. I did macroeconomics—the economics of public finances, political economy, I studied Marx and Keynes. In reality, that kind of economics is a kind of quantified sociology, so that kind of preparation gave me a real training. I had to study, I had to read a lot of philosophy, political science, I had to read a whole bunch of things that gave me a solid grounding, and that was something fabulous.

Then, around 2009, Wim Wenders came to our house, and I showed him the photographs from Genesis. I said to him, ‘This is the project I am working on.’ I made a slide show, I did conferences, I put some music to it. I didn’t know anything about cinema, but I asked: Is there a way to make a film of this? That was my idea. In my head, I really wanted the images to enter into that world in some fashion. L.O. Wim Wenders makes a very interesting observation in the film, saying that your training as an economist helped prepare you for the kind of photography you do. Do you think that’s true? Did it help, and if so, in what way? S.S. Yes, it helped. In reality, when you consider a photographer, he’s the fruit of his heritage. My visual heritage comes from the mountains where I grew up and a lot of my intellectual

Sebastião Salgado

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So when I became a photographer, I had a series of instruments for analysis and synthesis, and clearly all of that helped me. I would also mention my origins as a Brazilian, from a country in social gestation. So I came with all of that in my head, and my photography is that. And here’s another thing: I am an immigrant, so I was also doing my own story. All of this contributes to my work. My work is the result of my training, my heritage, cultural and ideological and ethical. L.O. You’re always described as a “social photographer.” Do you agree with that assessment? S.S. It’s limiting. Listen, I am not a social photographer. I am not an economic photographer. I’m not a photojournalist. Photography is much more than that. Photography is my life. It’s my way of life, and my language. I went to photograph the things that I had a great curiosity to see and to organize. I felt a certain revulsion, and a compulsion to show that others also have dignity, that dignity is not an exclusive property of the rich countries of the north but exists all over the planet. That’s what photography was for me, my language, my life and my way of going about and doing things. I’m a photographer without adjectives, and that is a big privilege, because photography as an instrument for capturing images is today being totally transformed. The telephones that exist today, the majority of photographs taken now are with them, and people have completely modified them on their computers. So

photography is being transformed into something else. Maybe in 20 or 30 years it will no longer exist, it will have become something else. I’m not saying this with any kind of criticism, I don’t have any bitterness in me, it’s evolution, that’s the way it goes. There are new options, so let’s go there, that’s what our society has done. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’ve been immensely privileged to have been able for 40 or 50 years of my life to go wherever I wanted and participate in history. That’s one of the things that most surprised me in the movie, to see the proof that I had the privilege to take part in the main stories of the time I live in, to be there. L.O. Should we regard the Genesis project, with its focus on nature and the environment, as a continuation of your previous work? Or is it a rupture with your past? S.S. No, in no way. I’ve always worked with stories. This is a story I wanted to do at that moment. You know, I discovered photography when I was already in Paris, preparing for a doctorate in economics. But the first images of my life, I saw them there at my father’s ranch, as a child, and they remained in my head. I took Wim to shoot there, and in the film there’s an image where I’m seated in what seems like a photograph, and then I begin to move. That’s where my father would take me when I was a boy. The ranch was large, and it took four or five hours on foot to get to that place, since my father didn’t like to ride on horseback. We’d get there and sit, mainly at the end of October

Workers place a new wellhead in an oil well that had been damaged by Iraqi explosives, 1991

SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

or the beginning of November, the beginning L.O. of the rainy season, when the clouds would Critics sometimes say that your images are arrive, loaded and heavy, and the light would “too pretty” in their portrayal of horrible things. be remarkable. It was such a variety of light, How do you react to that? with those mountains in the distance, like you see in the film. That gave me such a sensation S.S. of pleasure, it was the most beautiful and pro- It’s not my problem. I can’t do what I do in any found thing I’d seen in my life. In reality, I only other way. Once I was talking with [Gabriel] came to photography later, but the images were García Márquez, he had become a friend and already there, and that light! Even today that’s helped me with certain stories, and he said to me: ‘I basically write the same thing over and where it comes from, from those places.

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over. They are different versions of the same story.’ And it’s true. He couldn’t write in any fashion other than the way he did. When you write, you have your style, you have your form. Photographers are like that too, except that our language is a formal language, an aesthetic. Because we work within a square space it’s formal by necessity. So I can’t do things any other way than my own. There are people who like that, people who don’t, people who critique. Fine. But that’s the problem of people who look at the pictures. They may be right, they may be wrong, but it’s their problem, not mine. L.O. I have a philosophical question regarding how you think about what you do. Is it journalism or art or both? S.S. I don’t consider myself an artist. I have a concept of art that might be a little different, as something that tells the big story of humanity. The other day I was at a museum exhibition in Barcelona with my wife, a beautiful exposition of African art, of work instruments, pots for carrying water, etc. At the moment they were made, they were not art objects, but instruments for daily living that referred to that people and which today are considered art objects because they tell a story about that people. If by chance my photographs, 50 or 60 years from now, should be considered a reference to the moment in history in which I lived, if they should remain that for future generations, then I think they might be an artistic product that made an artistic contribution and have become everyone’s heritage. But I can’t say that

with the photography I am doing that I have achieved that, because that would be enormously pretentious on my part. I have to wait for history to say whether they are or are not. I know that few people can do photography, that you have to feel that instinct within you in that fraction of a second. Not everyone can do that, I recognize this. A photograph has my story, my ethic, my aesthetic, my ideology. It’s all there, my father, my mother. So it has a strong diversity, it tells stories. But you have to wait awhile to see. I feel very uncomfortable when I see a photographer presenting himself as an artist. I don’t have that pretension. L.O. So now that you’ve been involved in a movie, I was wondering: Will you ever do cinema again? S.S. No, once is sufficient. Enough already. Because there’s something I discovered about movie people: They are on a planet that it is completely different from photography. We photographers are instinctive, when something happens, we are there, photography becomes part of the phenomenon. You have to do it in a fraction of a second, you’re inside it. But when movie people are with you, oh my God, it’s so slow! And it takes a lot of time and energy, because you’re repeating things over and over. Cinema is very tough, very demanding. So I prefer photography.

SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

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IT IS SUCH A PLEASURE, TO THINK OF THE LEICA Hans-Michael Koetzle

So that is what they look like—the tables on unspectacular is in reality the starting block for which history was written: average height, one of the most successful strokes of genius in average length and width, and made of a wood the history of photography, the birthplace of an that could hardly be described as anything but idea which—without question—transformed average. We can only speculate as to the exact the photographic world. colour of the furniture. The photograph we are looking at is merely black and white. An almost “How can a technical object be developed legendary picture, printed and reproduced with foresight?” asks Michel Frizot in his New countless times, admittedly not because of the History of Photography. “How can an imprint table, but the person sitting at it. Oskar Barnack, of the present be made possible through the precision engineer, inventor—a genius, at least future, through something that does not even if the term refers to someone who not only exist yet?” Indeed, according to the author in aspires to utopia, but also surmounts innumer- reference to Gilbert Simondon’s Du monde able hurdles to make it a reality. So innocuous d’existence des objets techniques from 1958, the the table, so humble the surroundings. This is clue to “the conditions for a practice that is both no cool technoid inventor’s workshop, rather a socially popular and becomes commercially sort of handicrafts corner, that seems to match successful”, is more philosophical “than would the engineer’s white apron just as much as his appear at first glance”. To ensure the inventive reserved, almost shy look. But let us not deceive mind can function properly, the author continourselves. What at first glance appears so ues, you need “on the one hand a grasp of the

IT IS SUCH A PLEASURE, TO THINK OF THE LEICA

past knowledge and results, which down the centuries have often accrued independently of each other. This is needed for the construction of a technical object, makes the idea recognisable and its realisation possible. Additionally, an intellectual approach is needed, with which such future proceedings can be explored (in this case the creation of images almost identical to their natural parallels), and the strength of will to realise this almost tangible utopia technically through trial and error.”1

the Leitz company. On top of this must come the intellect already demanded by Frizot or better still, an intellectual, an artistic climate, that shows itself capable of absorbing an idea of such magnitude. On the fine dividing line between this, as both technical and cultural element we find Oskar Barnack as catalyst, if you will—the man who possessed not only the imagination needed to think ahead of his time but who also brought with him the technical know-how needed to shape it.

Although referring to the invention of photography in general, a discovery made by several inventors and tinkerers at the same time around 1830, Frizot’s formulation could just as easily be adapted to the introduction of the Leica, which was by no means just another camera in the sheer endless chain of photographic innovations. In other words, the Leica was in no way “merely” a clever further development, refinement or improvement on an already existing concept of photography. Its beginnings comprised something completely new, and it was only an intricate string of coincidences, fortunate circumstances and a certain spirit of adventure and preparedness to take financial risks by its inventor that actually made it possible. Which does not mean that in Leica’s case a number of discoveries and inventions were not required in advance, so to speak as conditio sine qua non for Barnack’s technical vision. Just think of the development of the celluloid roll film that replaced the old collodium dry plates or the introduction of the perforated cinema film. Progress in camera construction and precision mechanics were also required. Not to forget the development of optical systems perfected like a science by

In 1914, as the technician at the Optische Werke Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar was screwing together his first small format camera, the so-called Ur-Leica, photography was already around eighty years old. And it had already gone through a number of different phases. It all began, with Nicéphore Niépce and his picture of his parents’ estate in Le Gras, southern France, which took eight hours to expose. This was followed by the period of the daguerreotype. The move from salted silver chloride paper to the wet collodium technique marked the transformation to the negative-positive process. Photography could be easily reproduced, therefore demonstrating its second major strength compared to panel-painting-alongside the especially lauded preciseness of its imagery and objectivity. Whereby it is worth pointing out that the, although especially crisp, wet collodium process—“the most complicated black and white process in the entire history of photog raphy”2 with its no less than eighteen stages. A horse-drawn wagon with a complete dark room was often necessary for a successful result on location. The development of the silver bromide gelatine dry plate proved the turning point. The photographer became more

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Eisenmarkt: one of the first images made with the Ur-Leica, 1914

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independent, freer in his decisions as to when, where and what he wanted to burn onto the plate. In a certain respect, photography became more flexible. Although this did not necessarily make it really dynamic. Anyone involved in photography around 1900, was either a studio photographer prim arily taking portraits or an amateur in the spirit of symbolism and Art Nouveau-schooled artistic photography. What connected these two basically diametrically opposed directions was the pursuit of a concept. Photography was premeditated, whether it adhered to the traditional portrait, with customers seated between standard late Victorian furniture and knick-knacks or was based on the ideals of Art Nouveau, in the form of a tranquil landscape, a well-composed still life or as a mildly erotic nude. Photography remained in its early stages a static occupation and as such, a reflection of a static, meaning well-ordered, and seemingly socially stable era. 1914 brought an end to all that. The beginning of the First World War put an abrupt end to this era, which was by no means as harmonious as the label Belle Époque—which was coined some time later-leads us to believe. The cataclysmic First World War and the revolutions in Germany and Russia changed the map of Europe, the very political fabric of the class structure. It is by no means a coincidence that Oskar Barnack finished his original Leica in the crisisridden year 1914. It may well be true that the outbreak of war in 1914 prevented any further research arid development of the small format camera, as has often been written. But that would be simplifying things too much. Such a revolutionary invention as the Leica

needed the tremor at the beginning of the century in order to be conceived, built and in the end become unstoppable in its development. The history of the Leica is generally recounted from close quarters. It tells of a talented engineer called Oskar Barnack, who as an enthusiastic film-maker and hobby photographer constantly grumbled about his heavy equipment, comprised of wooden camera and lens, tripod and container for glass plates. All the more so, as Barnack suffered from asthma, and the tedious slogging with all that gear was hardly the most appropriate therapy for his affliction. Certainly Barnack seems from an early stage to have had thoughts on how one could produce large, technically acceptable pictures from a small negative. A grid-like structured gelatine dry plate did not have the desired effect. It was only when he started experimenting with a light meter—initially designed for use in the movie industry—that the inventive constructor came across the idea of adapting the already existent box to house a 35mm movie film and refine it into a practical everyday small format camera. At this point, it would seem appropriate to expel a widespread misconception. Namely, that the 1914 or 1925 Leica was the first camera using perforated cinematic film. The Leica was neither the first camera to use cinematic film, nor the first to operate with an enlarged 24×36 mm negative, as Thurman F. Naylor proved in his synopsis.3 According to the author in his essay for the Photographic Historical Society of New York, a certain Dr. Alberto Lleo from Barcelona registered a patent for a 35mm static image camera in Britain as early as 1908. Naylor dates the first marketable small format

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camera—the Tourist Multiple—to 1913 closely followed by the Homeos for 35mm stereo images. The 24×36 mm double-sized negative Naylor accredits to a certain George P. Smith, who had already developed the idea by 1912. In all, Naylor points to no less than 27 patents and marketable cameras—and all of them prior to April 1925, the introduction date of the first Leica. “And if we research long and intensively enough”, continues the author, “then we would very possibly find other small format cameras built and developed be fore the Leica.” That would appear to put Oskar Barnack’s muchlauded and well-documented achievements as sole inventor and developer in doubt. But only at first glance. First it is worth pointing out how often in the history of inventions and discoveries, the time seemed ripe for such an idea. And so, a number of constructors came up with similar ideas around 1900 using cinematic film—which had already been available since around 1888. They all had the same vision, obviously had time and money at their dispoal and of course the necessary technical know-how. Indeed, even Lleo’s original cam era—although it only survived in the form of a drawing—appeared to be a masterpiece of precision engineering. Other prototypes were no less impressive than their nameless forebear. Some, like the Simplex from 1914, could take up to 800 exposures. Others could also be used as film projectors. But this was precisely the crux of the matter. All the cameras developed before the Leica were both correctly and falsely designed. They made the possible possible instead of concentrating on the essentials, were often constructed more like movie cameras than still cameras, and they were expensive, too. Sandra S. Phillips was right when she

wrote: “Most of the early 35mm cameras were more clever than serious”.4 Oskar Barnack went down a completely different path. Coming from a background of still photography, he designed his camera so that it was above all functional. It had to be small. It had to be lightweight. In certain respects it also had to be ergonomic. Its utmost priority was to serve the static image: a natural companion in all walks of life. The less of an onus the equipment is, as the Leica photographer Ernst Haas once put it, “the more you can concentrate on the object and picture composition. The camera should simply be a part of one’s own eye.”5 And Bruce Gilden commented, that he takes photographs “with a Leica, because it is the extension of my hand. The size is wonderful, it fits like a glove.”6

Oskar Barnack at his desk, Wetzlar, Germany, 1933

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The First World War initially hindered the refinement of the Ur-Leica into a marketable product. The idea resurfaced in the 1920’s economic crisis in Germany. The Optische Werke Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar which specialised in the construction of microscopes was forced into looking for new products in, as we would put it today, the “consumer sector”. Barnack’s 35mm camera, initially in the form of two prototypes which had been successfully tested both by the inventor and the company boss, was just what was needed. The remarks of Dr. Ernst Leitz II are now legendary, as he abruptly ended a debate as to the pros and cons of the invention in the early 1920’s with the words: “The manufacture of Mr Barnack’s small format camera will be taken up on a large scale.”7

Leica I Model A, 1926

The Modell A was presented to the public with the newly compiled name Leica (from Leitz Camera) in April 1925 at the Leipzig Spring Fair. Originally, the camera was supposed to be called Leca, even the operations manual had been printed with this name. But just in

the nick of time someone discovered that Eka already existed as the name of a French small format camera. It was pronounced “L’Eka” in spoken French, and so the name Leica was decided upon. Prior to the launch, the company sent 25 cameras of the so-called Null-Series to renowned photographers, whose test results actually were rather critical.8 Many of them saw the Leica as little more than a toy. Whereby the selected professionals were under something of a misconception. Instead of recognising the positive attributes of the Leica, they compared the newcomer in all its modesty with the available professional studio cameras. None lesser than Paul Wolff put his finger on the problem in his widely read book Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica. The Leica, he wrote, is “no replacement for a studio camera, it was never supposed to be, and all parallels drawn to prove that the Leica cannot achieve what a heavy studio camera fixed on its forked tripod can, are two sides of an equation that can never work, simply because they are two sides that have nothing to do with each other. Here the Leica—here my heavy professional camera. If I know that I can complete a task better with the Leica than with my professional camera, then I take the Leica. If I am not so sure, then I stick one of those large plates in my camera. So what is the point of arguing, that is just making the Leica out to be a ‘would-be-great’, that it does not even want to be.”9 In the 1930’s and early 1940’s, Paul Wolff was amongst the main proponents of the still young Leica photography. He promoted the 35mm format in exhibitions and slide shows. His

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practical books, above all Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica and Meine Erfahrungen ... farbig sold in the tens of thousands and influenced more than a generation of amateur enthusiasts. Originally somewhat sceptical of the small negative, Wolff overcame one of the main problems of 35mm photography due to a lucky coincidence. The inadequacies of the early 35mm film mean that the end result was simply too grainy. Oskar Barnack and the inventive Max Berek, who with the Elmax 5 cm f/3.5, developed the first lens of adequate quality for the 35mm film, had both been confounded by the problem. Wolff experimented with an over-exposed film, that led to an almost grainless negative. His principle “Expose slow, develop quick!” soon became the absolute rule of thumb in 35mm photography—“the Leica had come of age for professional photography.”10 The time had come for a fresh approach. Politically, the First World War and the German November and Russian October Revolutions had created a new environment. The social order was in tatters. The brisk pace of technological advance was expressed in the very tangible form of cars, planes and skyscrapers. The arts reacted with constructivism, Dadaism and Futurism. Here comes the new photographer! was the, not inappropriate, title of a book published in 1929, that presented and promoted the new photography since 1918 in both word and image.11 The talk was of a “free view”, of a “new perspective”. How should, “the average, naked eye,” asked, for example, the filmmaker Dsiga Wertow, “cope with the visual chaos of this hasty life?”12 And Alexander Rodchenko added: “Today’s cities with the multi-storey

buildings, the special equipment in the factories and businesses, and above all the two and three storey shop windows, trams, cars, bright and illuminated advertising, ocean liners, aeroplanes (...). It would appear only the camera is able to reflect present-day life.”13 The cultural climate, without question, was more than ready to adopt a new type of camera, a congenial hand tool, befitting the visual upheaval of the period. Conceived in outline in 1914, the Leica appeared on the scene in 1925 at just the right time. It was compact and handy, while at the same time being robust and easy to operate. It made it simple for artists, who were basically scarcely interested in photo-technical details, to put aside their brushes and palettes and create images in keeping with the spirit of constructivism, creating pictures that put their finger on the questions raised by the new technological age. Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy, who later became a Bauhaus lecturer, and the designer Alexander Rodchenko were possibly the two most influential proponents of this new photography. And it goes without saying that it was the Leica, that became their creative tool. “We bought a Leica”, revealed Rodchenko’s wife Warwara Stepanova in her diary from the early 1930’s. “I can hardly believe it. We are so excited ... Rodchenko ... is really happy. It is such a pleasure to think of the Leica ... I sit down for a moment, just to admire it. It was perched the whole day on his desk. Only when he returned in the evening did he load it up and take a few test pictures. He is developing them now.”14 Photographers, armed with Leicas climbed up scaffoldings or masts. Or they took pictures crouched on their knees.

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Certainly the Leica not only allowed—in the literal sense—a light-hearted view from top to bottom or from bottom to top. It also allowed photographs to be taken in motion. The photographer—almost unnoticed—could even be a part of the proceedings. Although it has to be said that photojournalism was not invented via the introduction of the Leica. But it became more flexible, more dynamic and came closer to the action. And there was another bonus too. The Leica’s 35mm film roll enabled serial photography. While up till now, the average reporter had to go through the tedious process of changing glass plates, mostly in 9×12 cm format, the Leica allowed a second exposure with a mere turn of a knob to wind the film on. But the images not only became livelier in themselves. Above all the transformation from the simple documentation of single images to a more dynamic picture story helped photojournalism to new forms of reportage and picture essays. The Leica had photographic film to thank not only for the perforated negative. This new photographic ability to dissect an event into temporally distinct phases and aspects was—of course—also indebted to cinmatography. This was most clearly visible in the Russian constructivism, where the new technical imagery was not seen as competition for, but complimentary to current practices. The new photography with its will, finally to understand and accept the still photograph a technical medium, was not after all an exclusively German affair. But it fell on fertile ground in the Germany of the 1920’s. Defeat in the First World War, the Revolution, the end of

the Kaiser, mass unemployment and inflation created a political and cultural climate that was soon to prove the ideal hatching ground for innovative ideas. Free of any false pictorial glamour, the camera image presented itself in a sober, factual and clear manner, as what it was, a technical image in a technological age. Optical experiences were taken to the extremes of the imaginable via this new view of the world in a century of skyscrapers, zeppelins and aeroplanes. A previously ordered world experienced its de- and reconstruction in collages and montages under conditions set out by an art that often mocked the traditional ways of thinking. But the most influential change came in the field of reportage, whereby here—as Tim Gidal described in his oft quoted book on the development of photojournalism in Germany15—three factors came together: the introduction of practicable 35mm cameras, above all the Leica. Progress in printing techniques and marketing of illustrated magazines and the emergence of a new classification of professional or newspaper photogra pher. Not to forget the new forms schooled in constructive ideals of graphic art and typography, that made the sequences of images into what they would be remembered as in history: imaginative pictorial reports of the small and larger world out there. Paul Wolff originally studied medicine and practised in Elsass, but was unable to find his footing in Germany as a doctor after the war. Erich Salomon studied law and ended up a photographic reporter after working in the advertising department at the Ullstein publishers. Others studied anthropology

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Leica II Model D, 1932

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freely as with my feelings, without missing out on things, without technical delays. I suddenly had a very bodily feeling that I could finally express myself freely.”16

Leica M3 (Double Stroke), 1954

(Wolfgang Weber), biology (Georg Gidal) or sociology (Gisèle Freund). Caught up in the post-war turmoil, these self-taught photographers all had one thing in common, a not exactly straightforward path through life, that washed them up on the virgin shore of press photography. Here, there was plenty of room for young talents, who through a mixture of inquisitiveness, naivete and chappaz sought to find their way in the world and were able to tell extraordinary stories or could depict the known in an unknown manner. People who were not afraid to take photographs in extreme situations, by night, in a monastery or hanging from a parachute. For all of them, the Leica soon became an irreplaceable tool. It was compact, uncomplicated to use, reliable, always at the ready, could take 36 pictures in quick succession and so allowed the sort of dynamic photography to fit the spirit of the times. In 1928, André Kertész bought his first Leica. Now, he wrote, “I could finally react with the camera as

The late 1920’s and early 1930’s were without question the cradle of the Leica legend. What began in 1914 with the Ur-Leica soon became an important factor in the Optische Werke Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar. In 1926 they produced more than 1,500 cameras. In the following years, production doubled every twelve months. In 1929, almost 17,000 Leicas left the factory.17 By 1932, there were some 90,000 Leicas in circulation worldwide.18 The 1,000,00lst Leica was given as a present to the Leica pioneer Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1961.19 Of course, production was accompanied by constant further development and improvements. In 1930, the Leica was given a thread mount for interchangeable lenses, in 1932 a built-in rangefinder. Just one year later, the LEICA III went on the market with its long exposure times from 1 to 1/20 of a second. A completely new construction, the legendary LEICA M3, with bayonet-mount interchangeable lens, parallax corrected frameline viewfinder and improved rangefinder was presented at the 1954 Photokina trade fair. A further milestone was set in 1984 by the LEICA M6 with its built-in exposure metre for lenses between 28 and 135mm.20 Finally, since Spring 2002 the LEI CA M7 has been available with automatic exposure, thus setting a current high point in the technical history of Leica. How much the Leica from its very beginnings became an object of desire is neatly demonstrated by a Russian manual from the 1930’s.

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Tho se good at making things with theirhands and with only limited financial means were encouraged to make their own casings out of wood. The many replicas and imitations from the Far East or the Soviet Unionwere more serious competition, while at the same time confirming the unbroken fascination in Leica as the first functioning 35mm camera. In 1932, the emergence of the Contax manufactured by Zeiss Ikon in Dresden presented a real and at the same time home-grown alternative. A number of photographers—ranging from Bernd Lohse to Robert Capa (who also had a collection of Leicas at his disposal)—used the cameras for their reporting. But the Contax , with its long rangefinder base and metal slit shutter with a speed of up to 1/1000th second, could never achieve the mythical status of the Leica. Because the Leica came on the market first? Because it was most elegant with its curves and perfect proportions? So to speak, the definitive design concept? Certainly we are confronted first and foremost in the Leica with a unique top quality product. But that in itself is not enough to explain the fascination. Leica—that was always a major slice of emotion. “Leica was for me love at first sight”, explained the self-proclaimed Leica fan Sebastião Salgado.21 And Henri CartierBresson, the Leica photographer par exellence, exclaimed: “I have never moved away from the Leica, any attempt in another direction just brought me back to it. I don’t say that has to apply to anyone else, but for me it is simply the only camera, that comes into question . It is, and I mean this literally, the optical extension of my eye. (...) The way it sits in my hand, caresses my

forehead, its swing, when I move my attention to one side or another, gives me the feeling of being the referee of the proceedings, that unfold before my eyes and whose highlights I can capture in a split second.”22 Talking about the Leica means, in the first instance, talking about the camera, about the body which forms the core of the Barnackian idea. In addition to that come—from the very beginning—the unique lenses, whose optical resolution capabilities have always made photography with the Leica a special experience. Wherever the emphasis is on picture sharpness and contrast, then it goes without saying that a Leica is needed for the job. But aside from these technical arguments it remains to be asked if the classic Leica with its own distinctive Sebastião Salgado

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character, its own touch, its lightness and handiness and compact size, does not—almost automatically—create an entirely different image cos mos than any of the widely used single lens reflex cameras? Take its almost noiseless slit shutter for example. It allows photographs to be taken almost unnoticed and enables even the shyest photographer to produce close up, highly expressive pictures. Anyone who pre-focuses the wide angle lens and sets the manual shutter and aperture control need not even look through the viewfinder. Even politically or socially precarious situations—one need only think back to Michael von Graffenried’s images from Algeria or Paulo Nozolino’s pictures from Syria—can thus be mastered photographically. In contrast, photographers like William Klein or Bruce Gilden use the fast reacting Leica, for a thoroughly dynamic form of street photography that consciously uses the attention of the passers by. Portrait photographers appreciate the fact that the Leica with its well-placed viewfinder always leaves half of the photographers face free. That maintains the direct contact, the visual dialogue with the person being photographed. Not to mention the experience made by numerous Leica enthusiasts: the classic Leica is less ostentatious than many of the modern cameras, which enables an entirely different, relaxed atmosphere. Leica pictures, to formulate it succinctly, are pictures with a difference. Different pictures. Unique pictures. The Leica created—purely aesthetically—a special picture cosmos of the 20th century. Whether it was because the photographers used the camera in the spirit of its

inventor, like the great Henri Cartier-Bresson who used the silent discretion of the Leica to its full in order to get to that “decisive moment”. Or because, as artists they deployed the camera unconventionally, against the grain so to speak, like William Klein who made himself conspicuous as a photographer to provoke reactions, and actively seeking interaction - in his renowned New York series for example. To this day, it is no coincidence that people revert to the Leica. Anyone who opts for this camera system as opposed to the comforts of auto focus, seeks a particular style of image. They want total control over their creative process. Whether they follow the accepted rules of photography or deliberately break them. “Today’s generally electronically controlled cameras”, writes Tim Gidal, “are twice to three times as heavy as the first Leicas, do not sit as well in your hand and the viewfinder is not external, but is built in so that the eye can only see the planned cut out of the image. It is also possible to take good pictures in this way, but it is more difficult for unchoreographed, lively reportage since one’s full concentration on a task depletes in direct correlation to the degree of mechanisation of a tool—in short, it distils the proportion of the photographer’s input in his work ...”23 In this vein, the Leica remains to the present day the ideal divining stick for countless camera artists around the world in their search for new forms of expression or a new language of image. That goes for out-and-out artists like William Eggleston, Ralph Gibson, Lee Friedlander, Michael Ackerman, Mario Cravo Neto or Nan Goldin just as much as it does for essayists like Will McBride, Tom Wood, Lise Sarfati or John Demos and fashion photographers like Michel

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Comte or Paolo Roversi. And it also applies, of course, to the great swathe of young documentary photographers in search of a vivid, visual formulation of the state of our world. The Italian Paolo Pellegrin belongs to this group as do the Dane Claus BjØrn Larson, the Australian Philip Blenkinsop, the German Kai WiedenhÖfer, the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson and the American Larry Towell, to name just a few of them. Their pictures on the cutting edge between art and documentary will eventually form an integral part of the collective visual memory of humankind, just as René Burris’ legendary Che portrait does, or GisÒle Freunds’ portrait of James Joyce or Sebastiao Salgado’s image of an exhausted fire fighter in Kuwait— all taken with a Leica. In this digital era, in the age of the constant flow of visual data, people need “the large still picture” in order to attain that often quoted final staging post as described by the media scientist Norbert Bolz.24 People need something they can rub their minds and their imaginations on, and on which they can hang their memories. In short: they need the Leica—more than ever.

Vintage Leica Advertisement

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102

Michel Frizot (Ed.): Neue Geschichte der Fotografie, KÖln 1998, p. 15

Urs Tillmanns: Geschichte der Photographie, Frauenfeld/Stuttgart 1981, p. 84

Thurman F. Naylor: A New Look at the Old 35. The Origin And Early History of 35mm Photogra phy. Supplement to Photographica (A publication of The Photographic Historical Society of New York, Inc.), Waltham, Mass. 1980

Hubertus Gassner: Rodtschenko Fotografien, Miinchen 1982, p. 69

Ibid., p. 69

Ibid., p. 15

Tim N. Gidal: Deutschland - Beginn des modernen Photojournalismus, Luzern/Frankfurt a. M. 1972

Tim N. Gidal: Chronisten des Lebens. Die moderne Fotoreportage, Berlin 1993, p. 27

Sandra S. Phillips, David Travis, Weston J. Naef: André Kertész. Of Paris and New York, New York 1985, p. 58

Dennis Laney: Leica. Das Produkt—und Sammler-Buch, Augsburg 1993, p. 12

Verena Frey (Ed.): 75 Jahre Leica Fotografie, Solms 1990, p. 296

Gisele Freund: Fotografien zum 1. Mai 1932, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, p. 18

Magic Moments—40 Jahre Leica M, Solms 1994, p. 28

Eisenstaedt über Eisenstaedt. Photographien 19131980, München 1985, p.118

Rolf Beck: Die Leitz-Werke in Wetzlar, Erfurt 1999, p. 41

Magic Moments—40 Jahre Leica M, p. 18-19

Verena Frey (Ed.): 75 Jahre Leica Fotografie, Solms 1990, p. 298

Boris Kutscherenko: Die Leica Nullserie, in: Leica Fotografie International 5/1999, p. 18-19

Paul Wolff: Meine Erfahrungen mit der Leica, Frankfurt a. M. 1934, p. 13

Jean-Pierre Montier: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Seine Kunst, sein Leben, München 1997, p. 68

Tim N. Gidal: Chronisten des Lebens, p. 47

Norbert Bolz u. Ulrich Rüffer (Ed.): Das große stille Bild, München 1996

Rolf Sachsse: Dr. Paul Wolff—Im Zwielicht?, in: Professional Camera 2/1980, p. 58

Werner Gräff: Es kommt der neue Fotograf!, Berlin 1929

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EXHIBITION LIST

1933 Cercle Atheneo, Madrid 1933 Julien Levy Gallery, New York 1934 Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico 1947 Museum of Modern Art, New York, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, Rome, Italy; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh; Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile 1952 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 1955 Retrospektive – Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris 1956 Photokina, Cologne, Germany 1963 Photokina, Cologne, Germany 1964 The Phillips Collection, Washington 1965–1967 2nd retrospective, Tokyo, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, New York, London, Amsterdam, Rome, Zurich, Cologne and other cities. 1970 En France – Grand Palais, Paris. Later in the US, USSR, Australia and Japan 1971 Les Rencontres d’Arles festival. Movies screened at Théatre Antique. 1972 Les Rencontres d’Arles festival. “Flagrant Délit “ (Production Delpire) screened at Théatre Antique. 1974 Exhibition about the USSR, International Center of Photography, New York 1974–1997 Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris 1975 Carlton Gallery, New York 1975 Galerie Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland 1980 Portraits – Galerie Eric Franck, Geneva, Switzerland

1981 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France 1982 Hommage à Henri Cartier-Bresson – Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 1983 Printemps Ginza – Tokyo 1984 Osaka University of Arts, Japan 1984–1985 Paris à vue d’œil – Musée Carnavalet, Paris 1985 Henri Cartier-Bresson en Inde – Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 1985 Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico 1986 L’Institut Français de Stockholm 1986 Pavillon d’Arte contemporanea, Milan, Italy 1986 Tor Vergata University, Rome, Italy 1987 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (drawings and photography) 1987 Early Photographs – Museum of Modern Art, New York 1988 Institut Français, Athen, Greece 1988 Palais Lichtenstein, Vienna, Austria 1988 Salzburger Landessammlung, Austria 1988 Group exhibition: “Magnum en Chine” at Rencontres d’Arles, France. 1989 Chapelle de l’École des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1989 Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, Switzerland (drawings and photographs) 1989 Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany (drawings and photography) 1989 Printemps Ginza, Tokyo, Japan 1990 Galerie Arnold Herstand, New York 1991 Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan

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1992 Centro de Exposiciones, Saragossa and Logrono, Spain 1992 Hommage à Henri Cartier-Bresson – International Center of Photography, New York 1992 L’Amérique – FNAC, Paris 1992 Musée de Noyers-sur-Serein, France 1992 Palazzo San Vitale, Parma, Italy 1993 Photo Dessin – Dessin Photo, Arles, France 1994 “Henri Cartier-Bresson, point d’interrogation” by Sarah Moon screened at Rencontres d’Arles festival, France. 1994 Dessins et premières photos – La Caridad, Barcelona, Spain 1995 Dessins et Hommage à Henri Cartier-Bresson – Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain, Valence, Drome, France 1996 Henri Cartier-Bresson: Pen, Brush and Cameras – The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, US 1997 Les Européens – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris 1997 Henri Cartier-Bresson, dessins – Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal 1998 Galerie Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland 1998 Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach, Germany 1998 Howard Greenberggh Gallery, New York 1998 Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland 1998 Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany 1998 Line by Line – Royal College of Art, London 1998 Tête à Tête – National Portrait Gallery, London 1998–1999 Photographien und Zeichnungen – Baukunst

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Galerie, Cologne, Germany 2003–2005 Rétrospective, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; La Caixa, Barcelona; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Rome; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile 2004 Baukunst Galerie, Cologne 2004 Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin 2004 Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2008 Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook Photographs 1932-46, National Media Museum, Bradford, UK 2008 National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India 2008 Santa Catalina Castle, Cadiz, Spain 2009 Musée de l’Art Moderne, Paris 2010 Museum of Modern Art, New York 2010 The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago 2011 Museum of Design Zürich 2011 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA 2011 Maison de la Photo, Toulon, France 2011 Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany 2011 Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia 2011-2012 KunstHausWien, Vienna, Austria 2014 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cartier-Bresson, Henri, Clément Chéroux, David Henry Wilson, and Ruth Verity Sharman. Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Capa, Robert, and Richard Whelan. Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. London: Phaidon, 2001. Print.

Eisenstaedt, Alfred. Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt: A Self-portrait. New York: Abbeville Pr., 1985. Print. Erwitt, Elliott, and Biba Giacchetti. Elliott Erwitt, Icons. Cinisello Balsamo (Milano): Silvana, 2012. Print.

Capa, Robert, Cornell Capa, and Richard Whelan. Robert Capa, Photographs. New York: Knopf, 1985. Print.

Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikha˘lovich, and Daniel Girardin. Alexandre Rodtchenko: La Femme Enjeu. Lausanne: Petite École, 1997. Print.

Salgado, Sebastião, and Christian Sorg. Sebastião Salgado L’homme Et L’eau. Paris: Terre Bleue, 2005. Print.

Albus, Volker, and Achim Heine. Leica. Berlin: Nicolai, 2004. Print.

Salgado, Sebastião, Anne Biroleau, and Dominique Versavel. Sebastião Salgado: Territoires Et Vies. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale De France, 2005. Print.

Pasi, Alessandro. Leica: Witness to a Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Print.

Riboud, Marc, and Claude Roy. Marc Riboud: Photographs at Home and Abroad. New York: Abrams, 1988. Print. Dryansky, Larisa, and Edwynn Houk. Ilse Bing: Photography through the Looking Glass. New York: H.N. Abrams, 2006. Print.

Gustavson, Todd. Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital. New York, NY: Sterling Signature, 2009. Print.

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Photography, like no other activity that requires an instrument, has a purely positive stigma attached to it. Everyone can (or at least believes they can) take a photograph. It is a passion. Regardless of when or under what circumstances-whether professionally or in their leisure time, whether at a party or in the privacy of two-regardless how often you reach for the camera to â&#x20AC;&#x153;take a pictureâ&#x20AC;?, the process is always driven by the same intention, to capture this moment in time, this panorama, this situation for all eternity.