Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/05/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric, <<It was photographers who found the Leica to be the best tool around for candid photography that made it's fame. And the picture magazines in Berlin and then London, and the New York. The Leica created that new genre of photography. Not any other. The rest fell in behind, and then overtook them.>> Close, but no cigar. Quoting from Helmut Gernsheim's "History of Photography", "Advantages of the Leica were not appreciated immediately - - - It was in fact a plate camera, the Ermanox, made by the Ernemann Works, Dresden, and put on the market in 1924, one year before the Leica that for a few years proved a more useful tool for photographers needing a fast instrument. Indeed the powerful F1.8 and F2 Ernostar lenses made snapshots possible by available light at political meetings, indoor social finctions, the theater and so on. In conjuction with fast panchromatic plates, the Ermanox was the camera used by the pioneers of photo-journalism, Dr. Eric Salomon, Felix H. Man, and others who had to work in poor lighting conditions." LarryZ