Throughout most of the 20th century, the ability to view the world was not at the touch of a screen but through the pages of magazines that used photographers to bring events into your home. From wars to the first astronauts, to life in another society, those moments were captured by the correspondent photographer, the street photographer, the war photographer. Chances are they all carried a Leica rangefinder.
It was the camera that immortalised an era. In the right hands, Leica has produced some of the most emblematic images of generations. The portability and lens quality granted the freedom of use to capture the moment as it happened. Joel Meyerowitz, the famous New York street photographer, explains that the Leica rangefinder allows “the framing of the image through the viewfinder while keeping the other eye on the world around you”.
Joel Meyerowitz, New York, 46th St and Broadway, 1976. © Joel Meyerowitz.
In an age where cameras were clunky and large, Leica invented one with which you could take high-resolution photos on 35mm film. It was groundbreaking, so much so that the design and idea behind it have essentially changed very little in the past century. The first 35mm film Leica prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, Wetzlar, in 1913. But it was the camera introduced at the 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair – as the Leica I – that proved to be an immediate success. As Matthias Harsch, CEO of Leica Camera AG, notes, “With its compact format, the Leica I redefined photography, laying the foundation for modern photojournalism.”
At almost the same moment the Leica camera was created, surrealism became an artistic movement, with photography occupying a central role in its creative endeavours. Surrealists believed there was a super reality behind everything, and you just had to wait for it to happen. It was, in essence, how Henri Cartier-Bresson approached his images. Selecting a location, he would wait for the moment to be captured. The Leica was essential to Bresson for its ability to be anywhere, to photograph the everyday, people at their work or their leisure. In his lyrical view of French life, in Sunday on the Banks of the Marne (1938), two couples sit picnicking on the banks of the river, discovering a seemingly timeless order within the random course of everyday social reality.
Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, September 1936.
© International Center of Photography, Magnum Photos.
It was arguably in the theatre of mid-20th century warfare that the portable camera found its greatest stage as war photographers could stay with the troops to capture images of the horrors that confronted them. The man who brought war into view was Robert Capa. Armed only with his Leica, he was famously the only D-Day photographer, and his images portrayed the horror of the Normandy beaches in June 1944.
In his own opinion, Capa thought that the greatest photograph he ever took was, Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, 5 September, 1936, during the Battle of Cerro Muriano in the Spanish Civil War. He claimed he never even saw the image in the frame; he simply held the camera far above his head and pressed the shutter.
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Author: Andrew Hildreth
Lead image: Yevgeny Khaldei, Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag, 2nd May 1945.
