Leica

Around 1913, in a workshop in Wetzlar, an engineer named Oskar Barnack built a tiny camera so he could take pictures on his walks without hauling heavy plates and tripods. He loaded it with cinema film. Nobody imagined that this little metal box would change the way the world looks at itself.

Leica tells the story of that camera, from the first prototype to the Leica I presented at the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1925, and of the photographers who carried it into streets, wars and everyday…