The Leica Gallery should be in Bond Street.
The Leica Gallery is the place to go if you want to buy boys toys. A Leica camera costs as much as a small car. Leica owners don’t buy small cars; they own Astons and Bentleys. Nevertheless Leica is prepared to sell on the never-never to aspirational entry-level photographers.
An allusion perhaps to a forgotten film in the Bond canon: Never Say Never Again (1983). Unlike the other outlier, the 1967 Casino Royale, Sean Connery did reprise his role as 007 in NSNA. But I digress.
“The construction of the first, fully functional prototype of a revolutionary new still picture camera for 35 mm perforated film was completed by Oskar Barnack in March 1914.
The camera had a full metal body, a collapsible lens and a focal plane shutter, which, at the time, had no overlapping curtains. A cap, fixed to the lens by a screw, was swung across the lens when winding on the film to prevent light getting in. The Ur-Leica was the first camera to feature coupled film winding and shutter cocking – thus preventing double exposures. The camera took its place as a milestone in the history of photography under the name ‘Ur-Leica’.” (Leica Camera)
Since 1914 professional photographers and celebrities have been seen dangling Leicas. The latter thought the product might confer the results achieved by the former. Is a Leica today like an AGA cooker; obsolete? Most of us have pocket-sized cameras we sometimes use to make telephone calls. Leica is keen to dispel this heresy.
There is an exhibition at the Leica Gallery in Duke Street devoted to black and white photographs taken while making No Time To Die by three or four snappers one of whom is Daniel Craig. They are well composed pictures. Two things struck me: how few people are needed to shoot a scene and how realistic the sets are at Pinewood. Really Pinewood looks more authentic than Matera where the location sequences were filmed.
If you cannot tell the time without looking at a Rolex you won’t be able to take a photograph without pressing a Leica shutter. I have two big framed photographs of the River Oxus hanging in the study – taken on a throw-away camera bought at the airport. You Iikka this post?
Daniel Craig doesn’t always shoot with a Leica.