Not everyone has their own award
named after them. The Oskar Barnack
award, given annually to photo journalists, was initiated in 1979 to mark the
hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who invented the 35-mm still
camera. Barnack (1879-1936) had the idea
for it back in 1905, but it was not until 1913-1914, while he was working as
head of development at the German Camera company Leitz, in Wetzlar, Hesse, that
he was able to transform his idea into reality.
Traditional heavy plate cameras
were cumbersome to use and required significant preparation before each
shot. It was impossible to take a quick
snap of anything. Barnack’s camera was a
tough metal box that could fit in a jacket pocket and used a new kind of film,
adapted from Thomas Edison’s 35-mm cine film.
In 1914 Barnack took a picture of a soldier who had just put up the
Imperial order for mobilization. This
was a new kind of picture-spontaneous and capturing a moment in history. Barnack had held up a strip of his new camera
film and stretched his arms out. The
length of film between his arms contained thirty-six frames and this has been
the number of negatives on a standard 35-mm roll of film ever since.
World war-I put a halt to
Barnack’s progress and it was not until 1925 that the Leica 1 camera was
introduced (the name standing Leitz Camera). According to one historian,
old school photographers regarded the new camera as toylike but over the next
seven years almost 60000 of them were sold.
“The first commercially available
35-mm camera was the “Leica I”, manufactured by Leitz of Germany in 1925.
