Praying woman at an Underground Church meeting in Moscow, Russia, 1990.
Blog Note: This is a re-post from February, 2020.
In fact, I love Leicas. I think they are the ultimate and perfect expressions
of the camera-makers art. But do I use them? No. I like Leicas, but Leicas
don't like me.
In
the late 1960s I was living in Miami and teaching in a high school. For some time I had been looking longingly at the cameras in
Browne's Camera Shop in North Miami, where I could have
bought a pristine Leica M3 with a 50mm Summicron for $275 -- more than I could afford on my teacher's salary. But when I got a
$300 windfall, I didn't buy a Leica, I bought a Nikon F single-lens reflex and a pair of
Tamron lenses because I could
photograph my school's football games with the 135mm f2.8 telephoto lens .
I did later buy a Leica, a IIIC
with a 50mm f2 Summitar lens for $40 at the Bird Road Drive-In flea market, but
found it inconvenient to operate. However, I didn't want to give up on the idea of rangefinder
photography. In fact, I tried for 40 years (no kidding!) to make myself into a rangefinder
shooter because many of the photographers that I most admired shot with rangefinders and because I believed all the many photo magazine articles written in praise of the
rangefinder approach to photography.
Along the way, I owned a number of fine
cameras: several Leica M3s, a lovely Canon P, and numerous non-interchangeable
lens rangefinders.
But I sold my last Leica, a
treasured M3 with 50mm Summicron in 2010. The Retina IIc and the Olympus SPn
went two years later. They were part of a world in which I do not belong and
which I left with some sadness. I still believe all the things I read, but I
also came to believe that there is such a thing as a
rangefinder temperament, and that I do not have it. I reluctantly faced the reality that I am not and never
will be a rangefinder shooter.
In my heart I’m a globe-trotting,
Leica-toting, black & white documentarian of the human condition.
Well,
I
have indeed done the globe-trotting documentation thing, and some (but
not much) of it was with Leicas. But mostly it was done with a bag of
Olympus OMs. Because in reality I am an SLR-shooting, zoom lens, color
photographer whose
style (I flatter myself) probably most resembles that of Sam Abell.
But I have wondered many, many
times over the years how my life and career might have been different if I had learned serious
photography with a rangefinder system instead of an SLR.
About
the photo: In March of 1990 the Berlin wall had fallen just four months
previously. But in Russia, persecuted evangelical Christians were still
meeting secretly for fear of the government. The photograph was made
with a Leica M3 and 50mm f2 Summicron lens on fast but grainy 3M 640T
film pushed one stop to E.I. 1280.
Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia
are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal
address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943
Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how
you would like your book inscribed.
Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/ Looking is free, and you might find something you like.
Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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