I Did Not Buy a Leica, Part One

On a recent trip to San Francisco, my wife and I strolled down Grant Avenue through the heart of Chinatown. We began on the northern end and worked our way down to the Dragon Gate at Bush Street. Upon reaching that landmark, I said to my wife, “Hey, there’s the Leica Store. Mind if I stop in?”

It wasn’t my first time there. Back in July 2022, as I wrote here, I made my first visit. Instead of buying a new camera, I walked out with a copy of The Americans by Robert Frank. It was one of an excellent selection of books in their back area.

This time around, a part of me felt drawn to do a little camera gear window shopping again. But what I really wanted to do was have another look at their books for sale.

I will confess that I came within a whisker of buying a beautiful Leica IIIc and 50mm f/2 Summitar lens. After having done a fair amount of online reading, I had already come to the conclusion that the IIIc is the variant of the classic Barnack-style Leicas that interested me the most. Its die cast body was far more durable than earlier models, and flash sync contacts, features that I would never use, did not appear until the IIIf. This particular example of the Leica IIIc had been recently serviced by DAG, a highly regarded Leica servicer. Its shutter was smooth as butter, and its cosmetic condition was nearly flawless.

The temptation to buy it was strong. Opportunities to put my hands on an old film camera, bring it up to my eye, feel and hear the mechanical action, and get a first-hand sense of the condition of an item don’t come to me very often. I am a sucker for small precision gadgets, and having a first-rate example of a Leica film camera would satisfy a long-standing urge to play with one. It didn’t help that my purchase considerations had spousal approval, too.

But ultimately, I remembered my earlier camera shop encounters with rangefinders. I knew that I have grown too used to using SLRs and being able to look directly through the camera lens when composing a photograph. However much pleasure I would have gotten out of it, I knew deep down that owning a Leica was just not for me.

But I didn’t leave the San Francisco Leica Store empty-handed. In spite of being sidetracked by temptation, I did have a good look at their books. There was one title that drew my eye in particular: Early Work by Stephen Shore.

For the longest time, I knew about Stephen Shore’s groundbreaking work in color photography. Largely self-taught, he used highly saturated color to depict seemingly banal subject matter with a style that elevates it to high art.

His best-known work dates from the 1970s and later. I had never seen his photography from the 1960s. Paging through the display copy of Early Work, I realized how incredible that work was.

Shore took these photographs when he was a teenager in the early to mid-1960s. As I paged through the book, I thought to myself about the kind of snapshots that I took as a teenager. Even when I had brief access to a proper darkroom and could make my own black and white prints, the kind of work I was doing when I was seventeen wasn’t in the same ballpark. It wasn’t even in the same city. Indeed, it is still hard for me to believe that photography of this quality came from the hands of someone so young.

And on top of that, the level of production quality on the part of Mack, the book’s publisher, is nothing short of first rate. I would go so far as to say that it is the very best in any photography book I have ever laid eyes on. The image quality rivals that of a proper darkroom print. Yes, it is really that good.

So instead of walking out of the Leica shop with a camera and lens whose purchase would have emptied my wallet by over a thousand dollars, I walked out with a book that gives me inspiration every time I open it. Ultimately, I think I got the better deal.