MetaFilter posts tagged with leica

“A big warm kiss, like a shot from a revolver, and like the psychoanalyst’s couch.”

fearfulsymmetry — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:01:49 -0800

Though their cameras have produced some of the defining photographs of the twentieth century, Leica have struggled in the new digital age. However there are still some aficionados for the Leica's 'kiss'.

The Secret Police and the 35mm Camera

katillathehun — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:15:44 -0800

In 1934, the FE Dzerzhinsky labor commune in Kharkiv began manufacturing a rangefinder camera that copied the German Leica. Though production has long ceased, FED rangefinders are still widely used and collected today. But the FED and its manufacturer have a tarnished history - some of which is due to a work force comprised of children and criminals, and some owed to its namesake: Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police (NSFW).

The Leica Freedom Train

pjern — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:11:51 -0800

Everyone by now has heard the story of Oscar Schindler, but he wasn't the only one saving Jews in the dark era of WW II. This story was kept secret for many years, until the last member of the Leitz family died.

matteo — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:42:39 -0800

"To all our sisters who have committed suicide or who have been institutionalized for their rebellion."
Throughout her career, but especially in her latest and most wrenching work— Sisters, Saints, & Sibyls, the 39-minute three-screen lamentation that is a duel memoir of her sister's suicide at the age of 19 and her own mortifications of the flesh and battles with addiction—the photographer Nan Goldin has been one of the great living suicides of recent art history... Charles Baxter wrote that novelist Malcolm Lowry captured "the way things radiate just before they turn to ash." At her best Goldin does this too.

William Eggleston in the Real World

matteo — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 12:28:12 -0800

"I am at war with the obvious", photographer William Eggleston once said, explaining his attraction to a ceiling lightbulb engulfed in a shock of red or an old Gulf gasoline sign sprouting like a giant weed against a rural skyline. Attempting to understand that battle, filmmaker Michael Almereyda trailed the photographer in action and in repose over a period of five years. The resulting film is "William Eggleston in the Real World". More inside.,

William Gedney, photographer

matteo — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:38:23 -0800

What Was True. From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe, and filling notebook after notebook with his observations. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with clarity and poignancy. Gedney's America is a nation of averted eyes, and broken automobiles, and restlessness, a place Edward Hopper would recognize, but so, also, Walt Whitman.

James Whitlow Delano, photographer

matteo — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:02:15 -0800

A Tale of Two Chinas, by photographer James Whitlow Delano. Whole swaths of cities have vanished, to be transformed with developments that have quickly made them look more like Houston, Qatar, or Singapore than the ancient China of our mind's eye. The old hutong, or alleyways, of Beijing that once formed a mosaic of passageways and the siheyuan, or walled courtyard houses, have been largely razed. The old brick rowhouses of Shanghai, are now being leveled and replaced by modern high-rises. Traditional marketplaces, residential neighborhoods, streets where medicine shops or bookstores bunched together, are now either gone or have been rouged up as tourist destinations, part of a new synthetic, virtual version of China's incredible past. The energy fueling this transformation bespeaks a powerful but often blind, unquestioning faith in an inchoate idea of progress that takes one's breath away, often literally. (Unrestrained growth has left China with the dubious honor of having 9 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world). Delano's new book is "Empire: Impressions from China". More inside.

"Wwhy should we remember anything? There is too much to remember now, too much to take in."

matteo — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 06:44:28 -0800

In search of lost time It was Jack Kerouac who first defined Robert Frank's genius, who found in it some echo of his own vision of a vast, broken-down, but still epic, America, peopled with restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.
Frank's exhibition, Storylines, opens this week at the Tate Modern in London.

Voyageman — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 22:54:43 -0800

Family of Man Part 2 Many will remember Edward Steichen's (the first photo curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art besides being one of photography's greats) epic 1955 Family of Man exhibition for the MOMA and the ubiquitous book memorializing it. This is a worthy attempt at keeping that 50's spirit alive. PS all photos taken with Leica cameras, and for any Leica fanatics, take a peek at the just unveiled Leica M7 while you are at it.