The camera arrives in a thin, brown cardboard box. Inside the box is another box, also cardboard, but this time shiny silver with a small red dot on the side. One opens the top and the sides fall away in unison, like a Buster Keaton film set, only to reveal yet another box, this one black with hidden magnetic clasps. Open this and there is, of course, another box, grey and black this time, with that red dot again, and within this – finally – is a block of aluminium that has been polished by hand for 45 minutes (you can see a film of this on YouTube that’s called “The Most Boring Ad Ever Made?” ). Inside this aluminium block is 100 years of German engineering, and when you hold it in your hands you may unaccountably feel, as I did with all that cardboard detritus happily discarded around me, that you are holding the weighty sum of human worth.
Just a camera, of course. The lump of aluminium is called the Leica T, and it is an unusual thing. It’s not just a new Leica camera, but a new Leica system. The system – much to the horror of those who picked up a Leica in the days when Henri Cartier-Bresson was dancing through the streets of Paris – is the first Leica designed and marketed for the iPhone generation, with a large touch-screen taking up almost the whole of its back and not very much else. Leica has been making mass-market digital cameras since 2005, which is the year the company came close to bankruptcy for failing to tackle the digital market earlier.
But the new T abandons itself to pixels as never before. With a bit of external design advice from Audi, Leica has jettisoned almost every visible element that the company once considered necessary to take photos: the chunky shutter speed and synchro dials; the rangefinder window and eyepiece; the distance indicator on the helical focus mount – long forgotten and so grandfatherly.
In their place is one slightly raised button for taking a photograph, and two gently recessed programmable dials, which may be completely bypassed by tapping on the screen. But within all this reductionist, modernist, shiny newness, Leica has retained one feature that sets it apart from all the Nikons and Canons and Rolleiflexes you can amass: its sheer, undentable, age-defying, spirit-lifting, grown-men-weeping desirability. Only those with steel hearts will be able to hold one and not reach for their credit card.
The cult of Leica takes many different forms, but it may be best defined by one anecdote. An absurd story you may safely try at home. A couple of years ago, a man on an online forum was pondering what really made Leica, Leica? Why was the brand so indestructible and perennially appealing? Why would normally sensible people pay much more for a Leica than another camera capable of achieving comparable results? One can argue endlessly about the quality of the lenses, and about the solidity of manufacture, but the forum guy believed there was another factor: the red dot logo. He took this theory onto the streets. He put a red paper sticker on his digital Panasonic Lumix (which uses Leica lenses, and is, give or take a bit of lens coating, practically a Leica without the badge), and started taking photos.
He felt bolder. He felt more able to edge himself into situations from which he previously would have shrunk. When he reviewed his pictures later, he found them to be better than those he had taken before. All of which doesn’t say much for Leica cameras, but says rather a lot about their image. The tiny red dot enclosing the word “Leica” in flowery script is the smallest piece of successful branding in the history of photography. It may also be the most alluring piece of miniature branding in the history of luxury consumerism – some logos on watches are larger. Surprisingly, its presence on cameras is relatively new, and dates only from the mid-Eighties (for a decade before, the name within the dot read “Leitz”, the name of the parent company). When I recently mentioned the forum guy’s red dot story to Stefan Daniel, Leica’s head of product development, he said, “Maybe we should just sell red dots.”
by Simon Garfield, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Martha Pavildou
Just a camera, of course. The lump of aluminium is called the Leica T, and it is an unusual thing. It’s not just a new Leica camera, but a new Leica system. The system – much to the horror of those who picked up a Leica in the days when Henri Cartier-Bresson was dancing through the streets of Paris – is the first Leica designed and marketed for the iPhone generation, with a large touch-screen taking up almost the whole of its back and not very much else. Leica has been making mass-market digital cameras since 2005, which is the year the company came close to bankruptcy for failing to tackle the digital market earlier.But the new T abandons itself to pixels as never before. With a bit of external design advice from Audi, Leica has jettisoned almost every visible element that the company once considered necessary to take photos: the chunky shutter speed and synchro dials; the rangefinder window and eyepiece; the distance indicator on the helical focus mount – long forgotten and so grandfatherly.
In their place is one slightly raised button for taking a photograph, and two gently recessed programmable dials, which may be completely bypassed by tapping on the screen. But within all this reductionist, modernist, shiny newness, Leica has retained one feature that sets it apart from all the Nikons and Canons and Rolleiflexes you can amass: its sheer, undentable, age-defying, spirit-lifting, grown-men-weeping desirability. Only those with steel hearts will be able to hold one and not reach for their credit card.
The cult of Leica takes many different forms, but it may be best defined by one anecdote. An absurd story you may safely try at home. A couple of years ago, a man on an online forum was pondering what really made Leica, Leica? Why was the brand so indestructible and perennially appealing? Why would normally sensible people pay much more for a Leica than another camera capable of achieving comparable results? One can argue endlessly about the quality of the lenses, and about the solidity of manufacture, but the forum guy believed there was another factor: the red dot logo. He took this theory onto the streets. He put a red paper sticker on his digital Panasonic Lumix (which uses Leica lenses, and is, give or take a bit of lens coating, practically a Leica without the badge), and started taking photos.
He felt bolder. He felt more able to edge himself into situations from which he previously would have shrunk. When he reviewed his pictures later, he found them to be better than those he had taken before. All of which doesn’t say much for Leica cameras, but says rather a lot about their image. The tiny red dot enclosing the word “Leica” in flowery script is the smallest piece of successful branding in the history of photography. It may also be the most alluring piece of miniature branding in the history of luxury consumerism – some logos on watches are larger. Surprisingly, its presence on cameras is relatively new, and dates only from the mid-Eighties (for a decade before, the name within the dot read “Leitz”, the name of the parent company). When I recently mentioned the forum guy’s red dot story to Stefan Daniel, Leica’s head of product development, he said, “Maybe we should just sell red dots.”
by Simon Garfield, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Martha Pavildou
