Cynicism

I once asked a well-known photographer if faced with the choice would you buy a Leica Monochrome or a Leica Noctilux 50mm lens. He answered why not get both. That unsatisfying answer suggested a certain mindset.

On their website, Leica Camera highlights some of the more famous photographs taken with their camera over the last 100 years. It is an impressive show, and of course the implication is that such a collection could only have been done by their camera. All manufacturers do it.

In a similar vein, Thorsten Overgaard prepared an almost endless list of famous Leica Photographers, or famous people who use the camera, which includes Elizabeth Windsor.

These cameras are often associated with documentary photography or reportage, which usually involves capturing the real lives of people. People of all types and classes doing all sorts of things. Yet the camera that espouses capturing the elements of real life, the struggles, disadvantaged, the gritty, the horrible and the wonderful, has taken on a brand of privilege, as evidenced by some of the celebrity associations made above, but also in the price of the equipment. All this seems contrary to its documentary photographic role. It reminds me of a line from a long-forgotten comedy album describing “rich Hollywood actors playing poor destitute people.”