PARIS — The sale lasted nearly five hours on Saturday, June 8. The 44th edition of the Leitz Photographica Auction, the official auction of Leica cameras, took place at the Leitz Park, the German headquarters of the group, which overlooks the city of Wetzlar in Hesse, Germany.
Inaugurated in 2014, the Leitz Park houses nearly 1,200 employees and spans 27,000 square meters, including manufacturing workshops, shops, a museum, archives, a restaurant,and even a hotel.
“We welcome more than 60,000 visitors per year,” says Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the main shareholder and CEO of Leica Camera AG. The site is photogenic, with everything referencing the camera, highlighted by circular buildings resembling camera lenses embedded in the ground.
Special moments
On auction day, nearly all 400 lots of rare or used photographic products almost found buyers at various prices, some astronomical. For example, a 1958 camera base with “original and sought-after black paint,” which appeared rather chipped, sold for 26,400 euros. The record was set at the 40th auction in June 2022, when a 1923 Leica 0 prototype was acquired for over 14 million euros.
The logic may escape the layperson, but after two revolutions and nearly 100 years of commercialization, Leica cameras have entered a realm beyond mere commerce. Their buyers have an emotional relationship with the brand, forming an informal global community.
The club has an entry fee. The latest digital compact camera, launched on July 2, starts at 1,590 euros. And a legendary M series camera starts at 8,750 euros — lenses add several thousand euros.
Luxury camera
“In 1954, a Leica M3 cost four times the average monthly salary of a German citizen. It’s the same today for a digital M,” explains Stefan Daniel, Vice President of Photo & Technology at Leica Camera, who wears the brand’s red logo on his jacket lapel. This drives a significant secondary market for the range.
“I financed my first Leica, an M6, by giving math tutoring to middle school students,” recalls photographer Julien Mignot. “Today, I could probably resell it for the price I bought it at. It’s an object that time has little effect on, and it’s also something that can be passed down, like luxury watches,” he said.
Leica wrote a history of photography.
The manufacturer retorts that, first and foremost, it makes cameras — and does its utmost to make them well. It’s up to the market to decide whether or not it is luxury. Yet literature devoted to Leica, the names Rolls Royce and Rolex come up as glorious synonyms. It’s a tribute to the brand’s chic image, but also to the superior mechanics Leica offers in the photography market.
Yet it was Hermès that inspired Leica to adopt the codes of luxury. The French brand held 36% of the German company’s capital between 2001 and 2007, leaving visible traces.
At Leica, design and visual identity are centered around black and red. The colors dress the boutiques, which also feature a gallery. Prices are harmonized globally, and distribution has become selective. Some 3,000 dealer outlets have been closed in favor of brand-owned stores. A Leica is purchased from Leica.
The valley of optics
Leica even has its high-end custom workshop at Leitz Park, offering bespoke products for customers with deep pockets. Engraved with your signature, clad in your leather or luxuriously adorned with your preferred metal, everything is possible. This craftsmanship inherited from a love of mechanics, deeply rooted in the brand’s DNA.
Everything began with the acquisition of a precision optics institute by Ernst Leitz I in Wetzlar in 1865. By 1906, the company became the world’s leading microscope manufacturer. With mass production and export, Leitz transformed a 15-person workshop into a company with a thousand employees. It symbolizes the German Mittelstand, a network of large family-owned SMEs rooted in their territories and still going strong today.
Leitz introduced social innovations early, creating an employee provident fund in 1885 and an 8-hour workday in 1906. That same year, his son Ernst Leitz II joined the company. In the Wetzlar region, known as the “valley of optics,” competitor Carl Zeiss was nearby. One of his engineers left and joined Leitz in 1911: Oskar Barnack.
The perfect product
Great inventions often arise from passion or necessity. For this shy precision mechanic engineer with fragile health, it was both. With a clear, melancholic gaze, Barnack was a fervent photography enthusiast, worn out by the heavy tripod-mounted cameras of the time.
Cinema gave him an idea. He cut the large 48x36mm film in half. Instead of a vertical run in the camera, he rotated it for horizontal movement in a small box, adding a Leitz lens. In 1914, the 24x36mm format was born, along with the first 377-gram camera that fit in one hand.
No more need for a studio, just good shoes and the theater of the street.
World War I put the invention on hold. Ernst Leitz I died in 1920, succeeded by his son. Seeking growth avenues in a war-torn Europe in 1924, he recalled Barnack’s disruptive innovation. Visiting the United States, Ernst Leitz II discovered the “mass market” and saw the portable camera as the perfect product. Yet he was the only one on the Leitz board to think so.
After long discussions, Leitz made a decision over lunch. The Leica, a contraction of Leitz and Camera, Series I (or Series A) was released in 1925. In the first year, 900 cameras were sold, nearly 1,600 in the second year, and by 1933, the 100,000th Leica was delivered.
A new way of seeing
The portable camera revolution was also cultural.
“Leica wrote a history of photography,” says historian Hans-Michael Koetzle, author of the book commemorating the 100th anniversary of Barnack’s invention. “No more need for a studio, just good shoes and the theater of the street,” Koetzle says. The camera became an extension of the eye and arm.
“I would wrap the Leica strap around my wrist, and the camera felt anchored to my hand,” recalls photographer Sebastião Salgado, who bought his first Leica in 1974.
“It’s the only camera where the viewfinder is at the edge of the body. When the right eye aims, the left eye still sees the entire scene, missing nothing,” says photographer Joel Meyerowitz, demonstrating on his Leica.
Leica also helped document pivotal moments in news magazines. It captured Che Guevara’s iconic beret portrait by Alberto Korda in 1960, the fallen Spanish Republican fighter by Robert Capa in 1936, the napalm-burned Vietnamese girl by Nick Ut in 1972, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1938.
