My Leica and I

[Clevenson2@aol.com]

Fellow LUGers:

   I don't know how may of you own copies of Kurt Karfeld's classic 1937 book
"My Leica and I" but I recently acquired a copy and am finding it
fascinating.
   It's a compilation of essays and photographs taken by Leica enthusiasts
who were not professional photographers. Neat stuff.
  One article in particular was captivating. I have attached it to this
message for your amusement. The author's obsession with his Leica borders on
the perverse, but it sounded so familiar, it scared me a bit!
   Yikes! What does it mean? 

Corey Levenson
Oakland CA
My Leica and I.

	I would say of my Leica, as of a lovely woman, that even if it were utterly useless it would none the less supremely justify its existence. If I were condemned to be marooned on a desert island, without so much as a single inch of thirty-five millimetre film wherewith to mitigate the horrors of my loneliness, I should passionately beg to be allowed to keep my Leica. There is something about its slender body, so smoothly curving and so delicious in its proportions, which is at once subtly and continuously pleasureable and wholly satisfying. It need do no more than just look like that, a black and silver miracle in the realm of aesthetics, and so long as I could feast my eyes on it and prove, over and over again by touch and hearing, the superlative craftmanship that alone has made its creation possible, I should be more than grateful to have it with me, an unfailing amulet against the terrors of solitude.
	The fact that the Leica, in addition to being a thing of such beauty, is an optical instrument of unique precision seems to me to come near to raising it from the plane of the ingenious to that of the magical.
	This is no exaggeration, a wildly hysterical outburst on the part of a hopelessly besotted admirer. It is a plain statement of a considered opinion, and there must be countless other happy-starred folk, fellow owners as fully appreciative of their good fortune as myself, who would whole-heartedly endorse it.
	But I do not propose here to sing the praises of the Leica as a camera. I leave that to others in this company who, since they are more skilful in its employment, are better qualified than I to pay that tribute. What I want to do, in terms as sober and restrained as my wonder and gratitude will allow me to achieve, is to refer to some of the ways in which my Leica, as though by enchantment, has continuously enriched and coloured my life since the day when first I became the owner of it.
	I must admit at the outset that, both by temperament and training, I was peculiarly prone to respond and finally succumb to the unique fascination of a Leica. I have long had a notion (which I here disclose for the first time with pardonable pride) that even as a child I showed some faint promise of being Leica-minded. I shall doubtless be accused, in claiming such a distinction, of outrageously flattering myself. I shall therefore give what seem to me to be reasonably good grounds for my belief.
	In the first place, then, I had a passion, from my earliest days, for such toys as one could take to pieces and fit together again. And surely, of all such toys, the Leica represents the unsurpassable ideal. Those deliciously interchangeable lenses! That work of art they call a Universal View finder, which slips so easily into its appointed place and is instantly thereafter, as though welded, immovable! Who could be more likely than I to appreciate and be thrilled by such things as these?
	I remember, too, that one of my earliest and most treasured possessions was a disused bicycle pump. The smoothness with which its well oiled plunger could be made to travel, backwards and forwards, from end to end of that long black cylinder never failed to fill me with an almost sensuous delight. The boy, they say, is father to the man. Very well, then. Was there not, in my childish joy over the bicycle pump, an unmistakable foreshadowing of the delight in store for me, years later, when I first drew out the lens of my Leica and felt it's shining barrel glide softly under my fingers, light as a feather yet as solid as a rock? To me, nothing could be more significant. And there was surely the work of destiny in the fact that, years later still, when I blossomed timidly as a medical student, my inherent desire for beauty allied to functional perfection, or in other words my unconscious Leicamindedness, led me irresistibly to choose a microscope made by Leitz.
	I used this microscope for a number of years and found it not only faultless but incomparable. It was natural for me, therefore, to demand a standard of excellence no less unusual in a camera bearing the same name. To say that I was in no way disappointed is the highest compliment I can pay to my Leica. Even yet, though I have had it for some years by now, I am constantly finding in it hitherto unrealised possibilities. There appears to be no end to either the fascinating things I can do with it or the fantastic though pleasureable things it can induce me to do in its company.
	I may say at once that I can and do take photographs with it, and though I merely mention that fact in passing I do so with a definite purpose. I would not have the reader imagine for a moment, especially in view of what I shall have to admit almost immediately, that I am a simple sort of person who is easily pleased, easily astonished, or in the habit of behaving in any but an entirely orthodox and conventional manner.
	I was perfectly well aware, when I took delivery of my Leica, that I had acquired a camera; and I certainly expected it to perform as such. I will go so far as to say that, even when I found that in my inexpert hands it fulfilled this function with superlative efficiency I was conscious of nothing more than the normal emotions of a highly satisfied purchaser. But I suppose the spell was at work, even then, though it must have been a week or more before I became even faintly aware of it.
	Then, one night, I suddenly realised to my unbounded astonishment that I had actually taken my Leica to bed with me. There I was, a middle aged grimly self-supporting, ratepayer, propped against the pillows, screwing and unscrewing lenses and making the appropriate adjustments to my Universal Viewfinder, composing and taking imaginary photographs of articles of furniture of quite unimaginable dreariness, and generally behaving, in fact, like a child in its cradle!
	Since that unforgettable performance, which I unashamedly admit I have subsequently repeated on countless occasion, I have sunk steadily deeper and deeper under the spell of my Leica. I feel lost and naked in a colourless world if I have not at least some part of it secreted on my person. I have reached a stage now when I am irreclaimably bewitched. But I should hate to be freed from this enchantment.
	If I have no more than my viewfinder at hand, for instance, I am never at a loss for entertainment. With my eye applied to that magic peephole I am at once, it would seem, in control of the whole world. I can staggeringly enlarge or diminish it at will by no more than the effortless rotation of a milled disc between my finger and thumb. I am a humble soul and I find this sudden access of power very pleasing. I never tire of its exercise. It gives me quite a heady feeling sometimes.
	I have discovered too, that I have only to slip my Leica in my pocket to be immune to boredom, whatever the circumstances. Over and over again, in a theatre or at a dinner party, the feel of it nestling comfortably in my pocket has served instantly to infuse with excitement and adventure what would otherwise have been a period of unrelieved martyrdom. "At any moment," I tell myself, "if I wanted to, I could whip out my Leica, escape in a flash from this place of dreariness, and be happily busy with its fascinating mechanism."
	I may have neither the intention nor the desire to take a photograph; it may be that to do so would for some reason or other be wholly impossible. But the thrill is present just the same. And the essence of it is simply this: to be sitting there, decorous and unremarkable, apparently an ordinary humdrum person with no other resources in the way of entertainment than those which are shared by everyone around him; and all the time to know that my Leica is at hand, and secretly to exult in that knowledge!
	It is a comfort to feel sure that if I am ever involved in any major disaster I shall almost certainly have my Leica to sustain me in the crisis. It would be an immense help to me in a shipwreck, for example. It would assuredly be something, after grappling ineffectually with some determined lady for the one vacant seat in the last boat to leave, to be able to draw my Leica from my pocket and thereafter forget, if only for a moment or two, the undeniable discomfort of my situation.
	"At F/2, with that arc light behind me, this should be a corker!" I would say to myself. I feel sure that at the last, if the worst befell me, I should regret more than anything that my Leica was getting wet.

Dr. Harold Dearden, London
in My Leica and I, ed. Kurt Karfeld, 1937