With the advent of hand cameras and dry plates at the close of the century, and with the perfection of enlargers and rapid printing paper, Piazzi Smyth’s system of choosing a portion of the negative for the final print became regular practice. Stieglitz in 1896 tvrote that his hand camera negatives were “all made for the express purpose of enlargement, and it is but rarely that I use more than part of the original ‘shot.’ ” Instruction manuals and camera magazines became full of a new kind of criticism: beginners were shown how their prints could be improved by cropping or trimming, and they were advised to try masking their proofs with L-shaped cardboards. Except for Piazzi Smyth’s isolated experiments, the entire image formed by the camera had previously been so rigidly respected that daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite and stereographs were all made in standard sizes.
The portable hand camera thus brought about a change in working methods. The photographer’s output was increased, and oftentimes the recorded camera image was merely a starting point for the final composition. The hand camera also increased the scope of photography, for with it many subjects considered beyond the limits of photography were brought within grasp.
In the early 1920’s two innovations broadened the hand camera’s field of operation still further. Lenses were designed with greatly increased light-passing potver, and small, compact precision cameras were made on which these lenses could be used to produce negatives for enlarging to sizes rivaling the productions of big cameras.
Typical of these new lenses was the Ernostar, designed by the Ernemann-Werke A. G. in Dresden, and put on the market in 1925. Its diameter was at first half of its focal length, and marked accordingly f/2; later it was increased to f/1.8. Lenses of such large diameter are practical only in short focal lengths, for it is a rule of optics that, at the same f/ number, the greater the focal length, the shorter will be its depth of field, i.e. the zone between the nearest and farthest points that are in sharp focus. The Ernostar had a focal length of 4 inches and it was fitted to a camera called the Ermanox or Ernox, which used pieces of sheet or cut film 4.5 x 6 cm. (about 1 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches). The manufacturer's catalog said:
this extremely fast lens opens a new era in photography, and makes accessible hitherto unknown fields with instantaneous or brief time exposures without flashlight: night pictures, interiors by artificial light, theater pictures during performance, children’s pictures, scientific records, etc.
Learning of this seemingly miraculous camera, Erich Salomon began in 1928 to use it to photograph famous people in Berlin. At first, when he asked permission to photograph at indoor functions, he was refused, for officials could not believe that a blinding flash would not interrupt the formalities, leaving a dense pall of acrid smoke to hang over the dignitaries. Salomon convinced them by taking pictures unawares and showing them the results. Soon he gained the confidence of prominent statesmen and began to photograph in the very rooms where they foregathered. He took diplomats attentive and suave at eleven and then at one in the morning, slumped in their chairs, exhausted and haggard. Aristide Briand is reported to have said, “There are just three things necessary for a League of Nations conference: a few Foreign Secretaries, a table, and Salomon.’’ When an English editor saw these pictures, so utterly different in revelation from the usual posed studio portraits, he called them “candid photographs,” a phrase which stuck with the public.
The camera most suited for Salomon's approach, and that came to be dubbed the “candid camera,” was the Leica, which with its many imitators had the advantage over the Ermanox that thirty-six negatives, each approximately 1 x 1 1/2 inches in size, could be taken on a single loading of inexpensive 35mm. moving-picture film. It was the invention of Oskar Barnack, who was constructing microscopes at the optical works of E. Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany. Just before the First World War he devised for his own use a camera to take single pictures on standard motion-picture film. He was an enthusiastic amateur cinematographer, and had built the little camera in order to test the film he was using in his moving-picture camera and so to determine, by empirical means, the correct exposures.
The Leitz company soon saw that the little camera had potentialities beyond its use as an exposure meter. After the war the design was improved, and in 1925 it was put on the market. A collapsible lens of 50 mm. focal length was permanently fitted into the original Leica. The firs improvement was to make the lens removable, and to offer the photographer a choice of lenses of varying focal lengths which could be readily interchanged. In 1932 two important innovations were announced; a lens of great light-passing potver (f/1.9), and a built-in range finder, coupled with the focusing mechanism in such a way that the photographer, by simply moving the lens until a double image of the subject became one, could be assured that the negative would be as sharp as possible.
The tiny negatives were useless until they were enlarged, and to insure the maximum quality Leitz built a precision enlarger. Largely through the work of Paul Wolff, a commercial photographer who had acquired one of the first Leicas, the public became aware of the potentialities of the tiny camera, which at first seemed more a toy than a precision instrument. When 30 x 40 inch enlargements were exhibited, Wolff was deluged with questions. He answered them in 1934 in the introduction to his book of pictures, My First Ten Years with the Leica. He explained that his technique was in no way unusual, but in reach of all. To the criticism that the Leica made photography too easy, so that the photographer would be overwhelmed with negatives, he replied that the greenest of his assistants could locate any one of his 50,000 negatives in a few minutes. And he emphasized that the Leica was not a substitute for the larger camera, but another instrument with its own held — a held which was growing wider as improvements were made in technique, and particularly in the production of special fine-grain film and developing agents. Wolff’s advice was sound, but it went unheeded by thousands of amateurs who were fasci-
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| Salomon: Visit of German statesmen to Rome. August 6-9. 1931: Mussolini, Heinrich Bruning, Grandi, Julius Curtins. Courtesy Leon Daniels, Pix, Inc. |
nated by the convenience of the tiny Leica and the host of candid cameras that followed in its train. They vied with one another, not in making pictures, but in technical performance. At the height of the “minicam" enthusiasm, amateurs brazenly forced their way anywhere that off-guard pictures could be taken. Promiscuous snapshooting while the play went on became such a nuisance that theatres were forced to prohibit unauthorized picture-taking by the audience.
Professional work was, however, being done with the Leica and the somewhat similar Contax. Wolff was producing feature pictures by the thousand: Alfred Eisenstadt covered the Ethiopian War; Peter Stackpole made pictures of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco as the workmen saw it, from vantage points hardly accessible to the cameraman with standaid equipment; Thomas McEvoy took the readers of Time into President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s office and showed them a president at work, not consciously posing.
Useful as these applications of the miniature camera proved to be, the esthetic value of its new way of photographing had hardly been exploited. When miniature camera work by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was first shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1933 it was called, awkwardly enough, “anti-graphic photography.’’ The impression arose that the photographs had been taken almost automatically and that they owed their strange and provocative beauty to chance; they were described as “equivocal, ambivalent, anti-plastic, accidental.” For Cartier-Bresson showed the unreality of reality: the rhythm of children playing in ruins, a child lost to the world as trance-like he catches a ball; a bicyclist streaking by iron grill work. It was hard to believe they were deliberate records of previsioned images. Yet that was precisely how every photograph had been made.