A brief history of the press camera.
If you were an aspiring photojournalist during most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, then your dream machine was likely not a Hasselblad, a Rolleiflex, a Leica, or any of the other vintage film cameras commonly cited as the most desirable collectibles nowadays.
That is going to be our subject for today. In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the fascinating story of the press camera, from its birth and fame all the way to its fall into relative obscurity.Even during the infancy of photography as a medium, some manufacturers already thought of the potential in marketing a camera that is compact enough to be hand-held.
This, combined with rather slow lenses, meant that long exposures were necessary at any time of day, no matter the subject. And thus, walkabout photography, including live coverage and reportage, remained a pipe dream. This was a box-type camera made out of wood. Both the viewing screen and the entire lens board extended and retracted along struts and leather bellows to make the camera compact enough to fit easily into a bag.and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Enter simple external viewfinders. The Ango, in its case, used a Newton-type finder, which is basically a metal frame with a simple glass front lens and a gunsight-like reticule close to the user’s eye for precise composition. Though it wasn’t officially referred to as such, that might make the Goerz-Anschütz camera one of the first press cameras ever made.For a few years, the top dogs in the emerging press camera field were strut folders like the Ango. However, it wasn’t long before a competing design would emerge. That design was the large-format, single-lens reflex press camera.
Hence, the user experience of such SLRs is a lot more akin to a waist-level viewfinder twin-lens reflex from the 1950s, and remains so until firing the shutter, when a dramatic and extremely powerful mirror slap kicks in. Seventeen members of the White House News Photographers’ Association posing with their cameras in a group picture in the 1920s.
Washington Senators baseball player Herman A. “Germany” Schaefer holding a 5×7 Press Graflex camera in April 1911. Graflex had a long history of manufacturing SLRs cameras by the early 1920s and 1930s. That huge combination of excellent features and the existing reputation of Graflex meant that the Speed Graphic became the press camera of the middle of the century. Competitors, like the Busch Pressman and the Linhof Technika, were equally beloved and appreciated by their users, but none matched the Speed Graphic in terms of reputation or pop culture recognition.
In fact, the dominance of the Speed Graphic was so great that every single Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph until the year 1953 was taken solely with this specific make and model of camera!For that, we need to take a look at the crisis period of the press camera. This crisis began, ironically enough, right at the peak of its popularity, in the year 1925.Oskar Barnack
By the late 30s, Leicas were among the most widely-sold cameras ever made up to that point, vastly outselling Graflexes and only topped by cheap, mass-market box cameras like the Kodak Brownie. While not every negative would need a large print, especially in a military economy, higher-ups in the defense industry as well as journalists themselves increasingly became interested in the idea of developing more advanced enlargement techniques to get higher-quality, larger-scale prints out of smaller pictures and compact cameras.Despite technological advances and changes in mood, the American-made, large-format press camera actually remained alive and well throughout the postwar 1940s.
One of them, a certain David Douglas Duncan, experimented with lenses by an odd Japanese maker called Nippon Kogaku, recommended to him by a friend from the then-American-occupied country. With its reputation for war-proven reliability, easy ergonomics, 36-shot rolls of 35mm film that provided excellent results for most press work, and Duncan-approved lenses, the Nikon F SLR ticked all the boxes for journalists of the 60s. It looked like the camera of the future.How the Press Camera Vanished
The Mamiya Press was a line of medium-format rangefinder system press cameras by Mamiya produced between 1960 and the 1970s. Targeting professional press photographers, the camera failed to survive as the industry moved toward SLRs.It came with a variety of well-reputed Mamiya lenses, a hand grip that doubled as a remote shutter release trigger, and a built-in rangefinder as well as provision for a ground glass screen and leather bellows.
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