Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/21

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: [Leica] Fw: [IDCC] RE: Camera of the millennium?
From: "Roland Smith" <roland@dnai.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 21:50:02 -0800

- ----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam McCracken" <SMcC@bu.edu>
To: <idcc@KJSL.COM>
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 8:55 AM
Subject: [IDCC] RE: Camera of the millennium?


>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: idcc-admin@KJSL.COM [mailto:idcc-admin@KJSL.COM]On Behalf Of David
> Foy
> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 11:25 AM
> To: idcc@KJSL.COM
> Subject: [IDCC] RE: Camera of the millenium?
>
>
> >>I understand that the Leica's mystique and mythology bedazzle many
> >>people, but having owned and hated two of the wretchedly over-rated
> >>things, I don't feel like automatically signing off on Sam's
> >>nomination.
>
> Personally, I am so un-bedazzled that I have never owned even one of the
> wretchedly over-rated things.
>
> I guess I interpreted the question as "what is the most consequential
camera
> of the 20th century?"   The Leica was the commercially successful and
> widely-imitated launcher of a package:  the 24x36 format, five-foot strips
> of 35mm film, fast, short, high precision lenses, eye-level view finding.
> None of these was original to it, of course, except the format (I think),
> but in toto they led to the sort of photography most widely practiced even
> today.  It could have been considerably less able than it was and still
been
> as consequential.  The typical digital camera is, in everything but
medium,
> the Leica's child, no more different from it than similar wet and dry
plate
> field cameras.
>
> The question does not reach to whether one likes Leicas or whether someone
> else would have come along if Barnack had been killed in a hiking accident
> in 1912.
>
>
> Sam
>
> _______________________________________________
> IDCC mailing list  -  IDCC@KJSL.COM
> http://WWW.KJSL.COM/mailman/listinfo/idcc
>