Leica LTM Ken Rockwell's take on why Cartier-Bresson only shot with a 50

Leica M39 screw mount bodies/lenses
Photography is like climbing mt. Everest with a gas mask on.
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I'm struggling to find the meaning in your statement Nh3 ... photography is more complex than a lot of people realise no doubt but surely the difficulty is relevant to the the level you feel you need to atain to actually regard yourself as a photographer.

There's a lot of highly talented mountaineers who have never reached the summit of Everest and never will ... it doesn't mean they haven't succeeded as climbers.

Why do you make this statement ... be more specific please. 🙂
 
I make occasional $ contributions to KR because he has some excellent gear reviews and this has saved me money (Ok, maybe not Leica).

I dont get worked up over what he says.
 
Eh, no. There's so much misinformation in that piece that I'm not even sure where to start.

Bresson came from a very wealthy family and didn't exactly have to scrape money together to buy his first Leica. They were the largest manufacturer of sewing thread in France and among the biggest in Europe. They were borderline aristocrats. Early in his life Henri wanted to be a painter and fell in with the surrealists. He described himself as an anarchist until his dying day, but he was always torn between those two worlds.

Bresson started with a 50, because around 1930 that was pretty much all you got. The original Leica only came with a fixed 50 and it wasn't until around 1930 that the Leica Standard arrived. With this camera you could freely exchange lenses, as the flange focal distance was standardized for all bodies.

Before zooms it was not uncommon that professionals standardized on a single focal length for their work. People like Antonin Kratochvil and Winogrand picked the 28. Capa mostly shot with a 50.

A 50 in capable hands can do almost anything, unless you are shooting something specialized like wildlife etc. Bresson settled on a 50 and VIDOM finder for the majority of his work.

He started out with a 3.5/50 Elmar and it seems also used a 2/50 Summar. At some point during the 1940's he got hold of a Sonnar 1.5/50 in Leica LTM mount, that he used until around 1954, when he switched to the Summicron 2/50 collapsible. He continued to use the Summicron collapsible and rigid Summicron 2/50 for the next several decades. There also are some pictures of him with a black 2/50 Summicron that appears to be a type 3. But he stuck with the old glass, because he preferred their lower contrast.

Back in the early days (until about 1960) with few exceptions notably from Zeiss, the performance of anything wider than a 50 was not exactly stellar. Anything wider or significantly longer than a 50 was also several stops slower and with film speeds ranging from 6 asa - 100asa, this was a serious consideration. We didn't get Tri-X until 1954 and then it was rated at a breathtaking 200 asa.

There are photos of Bresson shooting with a 35 and he was also known to shoot with a 90 (mostly landscapes). Shortly after the war he shot large portions of a project on the USA with a 35, but his mainstay was the 50. He and probably 90% of 135 format shooters, until the 1960's, when good 35's became widely available.

The Contax was not as popular as the Leica for several reasons. Back in those days Zeiss had the better lenses, but the Contax I was a disaster, with a shutter that was totally unreliable and it's reputation lingered. Even someone like Henry Scherer (www.zeisscamera.com) can't get these cameras to run reliably. The Contax series was also very expensive. By the time Zeiss released the Contax II (which is a good camera), Leica had established itself as the brand of choice and the system and it's clones were enjoying world wide popularity. The outbreak of WWII probably also didn't help the Contax II, as few examples were exported. Leica's and LTM lenses were readily available outside of Germany. After the outbreak of hostilities there were active programs among the Allies to clone Leica LTM bodies to meet domestic demand.

Sometime around 1936-38 Robert Capa switched from Leica to a Contax II, but he was in the minority. He favored the stellar Sonnar 1.5/50 and combined rangefinder viewfinder. Apparently Eugene Smith also used a Contax II for a period in the Pacific, but Smith would shoot with anything that made a picture.

Bresson was and wasn't a journalist. Even before the outbreak of WWII Bresson was a photographic artist with an international reputation. Unlike Capa and the rest, HCB did not have to make a living as a journalist and was free to travel and shoot whatever he wanted.

HCB was a POW for several years during WWII. He made several escape attempts and eventually succeeded. He dug up his Leica and negatives and hid out in Paris, until the Allies liberated the city in 1944. During this period HCB was actually thought to be dead and shortly after the war he traveled to New York to visit a posthumous exhibit of his work.

After WWII Capa, HCB, George Roger and Seymour Chim founded MAGNUM. Bresson shot assignments for all the major publications, but if you look at his catalog his work, it is very different from the hard news that Capa etc were doing. Again, money and temperament had a lot to do with it.
 
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The Cartier-Bressons were not really borderline aristocrats. They were/are a well to do upper middle class family who hyphened their name in the mid 19th century when that was the thing to do. All of the family have worked except for Henri C-B who was an artist, in the way that 19th families always had a member who became a priest.

To call him Bresson is a bit confusing, I guess, because of Robert Bresson the film director who is really the "Bresson." The shortened use, Mr. Cartier, I've heard used in France, but I don't know if that's correct.
 
summaron said:
The Cartier-Bressons were not really borderline aristocrats. They were/are a well to do upper middle class family who hyphened their name in the mid 19th century when that was the thing to do. All of the family have worked except for Henri C-B who was an artist, in the way that 19th families always had a member who became a priest.
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Well, after the French revolution there obviously weren't many aristocrats left... They were replace by a new upper class made up from business men, industrialists etc. I meant it in that sense, not necessarily lineage.

To call him Bresson is a bit confusing, I guess, because of Robert Bresson the film director who is really the "Bresson." The shortened use, Mr. Cartier, I've heard used in France, but I don't know if that's correct.
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Fair enough, but I'm pretty sure that on this list we all know whom we are talking about.
 
I think Ken is more sophisticated than most of you guys think. He was using literary license to make a point and the article is a complete diss of Nikon's pricing strategy on the D3x. If you actually read it, he directly and indirectly praises Leica, film, and HCB. He obviously knew that Contaxes sold for more than Leicas back in the day, so he is hardly ignorant, he is just trying to jostle (your?) wealthy hobby photographers' chains.

More power to him for supporting his family from those silly articles, it's amazing really.
 
bmattock said:
It was intended as humor. I'm not sure how it is that people don't get that. Even if one doesn't find it amusing, surely it isn't that hard to recognize a jape when one sees one?
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Hard to tell. Rockwell has written some good things, but also a lot of silly stuff over the years, so it's hard to tell when he's being serious.
 
So he is not funny, neither is David Letterman and he has a staff of so called joke writers.

I will be interested in the reviews of the Leica equipment, I hope that he has a good selection to test. I enjoyed KR's reviews on medium format Mamiya 6 &7 rangefinders, and agreed with his findings.

I note that Leica film gear is holding its price against Nikon F5 very well. If the F5 is worth that little then he is right the digital stuff will likely suffer more rapid depreciation in the coming years.

KR's is a skilled showman, a Victor Borga type prankster , he pokes fun but its tough to tell when he is serious and can play a Rondo or not.
It makes those that hate him come back for more abuse.
 
Keith said:
I'm struggling to find the meaning in your statement Nh3 ... photography is more complex than a lot of people realise no doubt but surely the difficulty is relevant to the the level you feel you need to atain to actually regard yourself as a photographer.

There's a lot of highly talented mountaineers who have never reached the summit of Everest and never will ... it doesn't mean they haven't succeeded as climbers.

Why do you make this statement ... be more specific please. 🙂
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How to visually capture the essence of a poem that one reads and then reads it again and again, and each time it means something else.

Btw, I'm perfectly sober. 🙂
 
Whatever you think of Ken Rockwell, he will go down as a legend on the photography world for good and bad reasons, but that is more than most of us will ever do. Nobody writes or talks, or even knows anything about us, while we debate Ken's sense humour and literary skills in a audience of thousands.

He has outsmarted us...

As for a 50mm lens, I have decided that if I had to hock everything I owned to survive this 'financial meltdown', I would keep my Bessa R2 and Nokton 50/1.5...
 
Michiel Fokkema said:
but he proudly says on his website that he doesn't answer mail.
Michiel Fokkema
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Don't believe that Ken Rockwell doesn't answer e-mail.

Earlier this year, I e-mailed him about a significant technical error in his article about how to do auto fill flash with a Vivitar 283/385. He responded within 24 hours thanking me and indicating he had corrected his article.

Now I bet that 99% of his e-mail does go unanswered. But that is because he would otherwise spend his time in endless debate.
 
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