Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Every now and then you will come across an on-line article that should be put down in “squiggles and spots of ink” which a clever reader will understand (to paraphrase W. T. Pooh). Leaving it in 0s and 1s on the uncertain Web consigns it to electronic limbo and makes sure only a small, perhaps uncaring, group will read it.

The article I wish to draw your attention to is at the New Yorker’s web-site,

CANDID CAMERA - The cult of Leica by Anthony La

For readers who are tyros in the Tyrolean world of high-end photographic equipment, the article presents the romantic, yet real, world of the Leica camera. As Mr. La points out there is a cult of the Leica, but not an ignorant one: most of the best 35 mm photographers of the past century have sworn by the Leica M-series because it was the best 35 mm film camera there was. To wit,

… as the camera has evolved over eight decades, generations of users have turned to it in their hour of need, or their millisecond of inspiration. Aleksandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Sebastião Salgado: these are some of the major-league names that are associated with the Leica brand—or, in the case of Cartier-Bresson, stuck to it with everlasting glue.

If you have any interest in the power of image and the technology that creates it, it would be worth your while to read this free New Yorker article. One more quote:

I remembered what Cartier-Bresson once said about turning from painting to photography: “the adventurer in me felt obliged to testify with a quicker instrument than a brush to the scars of the world.”

For the film buff: There really was a reason all the old Disney animatics for their classic films of the 30s and 40s were known as “leica reels”!