Rare Leica Photograph Print Oscar Barnack's Children, by Inventor of 35mm Camera For Sale

Background

Please allow me to first tell a short background story about this photographic print.

Near the town of Wetzlar in 1905 (in the old German Kaiser’s empire), a man in a light-colored suit and straw hat struggles toward the top of a hill … his wooden tripod and large plate camera in his hands.Behind him rises the smokestack of the Optische Werke Ernst Leitz factory (Ernst Leitz Optical Works). After huffing to reach the top, he opens the tripod of an awkward large format camera and its leather bellows.

It’s an unusually warm afternoon, and his asthma is giving him no peace.

The former Carl Zeiss employee wipes his brow in between taking all eight images on the fragile glass plates, placing each one carefully back in a large leather case.

After finishing his camera lens tests, he stares at the camera and tries to think of it being smaller — a lot smaller — and without the heavy wooden tripod.

He thinks some more and imagines a camera that could actually fit in his jacket pocket … without using the fragile glass plates.

Instead, he imagines, this camera would be loaded with film like the kind used in silent movies of the day. Enlarging the images could be done later using the cinema film negative.

He asks himself, “But what would I take photographs of?” (Anything and everything, as he soon found out.)

The imaginative man that day was Oskar Barnack, an employee of the Leitz Werke Wetzlar and a pioneer of photography. He invented and constructed the first still picture camera for the 35mm film format (24 × 36 mm) in 1914.

The Camera

The construction of this new camera according to Barnack's philosophy of "small negative - big picture" concept completely changed the world of photography with vastly increased creative scope for photographers.

You see, up until then, photographers had had to rely primarily on cumbersome large format plate cameras for their work.

Barnack therefore originally gave his compact and highly portable prototype camera the name ‘Liliput', as is noted in the company archives in a document dated March 1914: "Liliput camera completed".

His original prototype camera is still in the possession of Leica Camera AG, together with his negatives and prints of those first exposures captured with the Ur-Leica.

“Ur” is a German abbreviation for “original”, and Urbild means “prototype.

Barely 100 years later, the digital photography revolution is complete.

Yet even today, Barnack’s influence can still be felt. Did you know full-frame digital sensors record an image on a 24x36 millimeter sensor? That was Barnack’s new standard negative size.

But back to the conclusion of my story.

The Image

In the course of his work at Leitz (Leica) as Director of Research and Development, Barnack was soon taking walks around the town of Wetzlar and into the countryside to test his new invention.

His trips provided a photographic opportunity that has left us a good stock of historic negatives from that earliest Leica camera, including a number of pictures of Ernst Leitz and of Barnack himself.

Sometimes he took spontaneous pictures of everyday things... a mother and her son, a new steel bridge, a saddlemaker at work, women walking down a narrow alley, or a sunlit mountain vista.

But it was on one of these testing forays that he happened to snap a picture of his very own children, which is the image you see here available for purchase.

Barnack’s children's names were Johanna (or, Hanna), born in 1906, and Conrad, born in 1908.

Barnack was particularly fond of Hanna’s blond locks; many photographs show her alone, but there are several together with Conrad.

There are only a few images of Conrad by himself.

A comparison with later pictures of the two indicates that these pictures were taken in the summer of 1914.

Conrad had just started going to school, which is when boys began to wear sailor-style shirts. The gaze of the shy child is already mixed by the saucy expression of a future rascal.

The children know to keep very still when their father was taking a photograph — this was true of the Ur-Leica too, because photographic film was not very sensitive to light back then.

This is apparent from the shadows, which are not very differentiated. This is indeed a very early image taken with the Ur-Leica camera he made in 1913.

Then, in 2004 (on the 90th anniversary of its creation), Leica Camera commissioned a series of replica cameras to celebrate the inventor of Leica and the 35mm camera, Oscar Barnack.

At the same time, Leica offered a limited series of prints made directly from Oscar Barnack's original 1914 negatives.

Ten different images were selected, and only 100 prints of each negative were made by a master photographic printer.

After the prints were completed, the negatives were once again secured in the Leica vault... perhaps for another 100 years.

Details

Specifics about this historic piece of photographic art:

• Leica certifies that the print and the negative used for it are originals, and that it is a photograph taken by Oskar Barnack himself using the Ur-Leica
  
• This print was produced in Leica's own photo laboratory using the LEICA V35 enlarger
• The paper used was Berger VCB Baryte style, which received an additional final treatment to provide optimum archival protection against harmful environmental influences
• The print is in a 30 x 40 cm format (40 x 50 cm format mounted) and has a unique serial number
  
• The print is professionally mounted on archive board and stored in a polypropylene archival envelope
• The manufacturing and storage process was completely in line with museum standards
• These prints were a strictly limited edition … only 100 copies of each photograph have been produced, from 10 carefully chosen negatives; documentation of originality is included

Please excuse the quality of my photos – I have chosen not to remove the protective covering from the print so a true image of the stunning quality of the print is not possible. Interested buyers should be able to search for the relevant information to see the photos in more detailed quality.

This particular listing is for the photo with code 96074 - "Oskar Barnack's Children".

Please contact me if you have any questions.

Thank you for reading my little story!