One hundred years ago, photography involved wooden cameras, metal tripods and glass plates. Then along came the Leica 1(A), a device that repurposed 35mm movie-film negative for a camera that was portable, lightweight and allowed users to take more than one shot without changing the film.
It was dismissed as a toy.
“Professional photographers didn’t trust it,” says Stefan Daniel, executive vice president of technology and operations at Leica, from the company’s headquarters in the city of Wetzlar, near Frankfurt, Germany.
“It’s the typical reaction when something revolutionary comes up. But it really made photography much more mobile, much more agile than before.”
Early adopters — including street photographers, explorers and members of the Bauhaus movement — did trust it, seeing the potential after it launched at the 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair.
The 1(A) was prophetically named: creating a paradigm shift that took photography from a stiff, studio-based practice into a versatile and candid art form, opening up new possibilities for enthusiasts and pros alike.
As Leica prepares for a year of centennial celebrations, it doesn’t want for credible advocates. Elvis Presley, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Miles Davis were all fans; as are Brad Pitt, Daniel Craig and Lenny Kravitz today.
The professional snappers soon came around, too — Henri Cartier-Bresson is synonymous with his Leica 35mm (fitted with a 50mm lens), and from there, you can count off endorsements from Robert Capa, William Eggleston, Vivian Maier and Robert Frank, up to Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Leibovitz and Greg Williams now.
The brand has endured partly because it has kept up with the times; it launched its first mirrorless (silent) camera, the Leica SL, in 2015. An instant camera, the Leica Sofort, followed in 2016. A compact full-frame digital model, the Leica Q2, arrived in 2019.
More significantly, it has maintained exclusivity, luxury appeal and fierce brand loyalty, thanks to the emotional connection photographers feel they get from a Leica, and a Leica only. Each model is still hand-assembled in Germany, and built to last.
“At the origin, there wasn’t a designer at work,” says Daniel. “There were the engineers doing the product. Only, looking back, you can see what an amazing job they have done, to create a very functional product, which is beautiful in itself. It’s not a coincidence that the Q looks like an SL, or the Sofort. We never give room to ‘Oh, we could add this or that function’. It’s ‘less is more’.
“Because in the end, you should concentrate on the subject, not the camera. It makes your images much, much better.”
