The new book “Museum Leica” by Lars Netopil is now available for sale at the Leica Store Miami:
Lars Netopil has compiled an exhaustive volume to illustrate what future visitors to the Leica Museum can look forward to discovering. The Leica expert and historian, who also owns a Leica Store for vintage and contemporary cameras in Wetzlar’s Old Town, has published several books within his field in the past. For this endeavor, his well-established team has documented the treasures to be displayed at Leica’s factory museum. The book was designed by David Pitzer, the over 600, mostly large-format photographs were created by Wolfgang Sauer.
In 36 chapters, the essential exhibits from the inventory of the new Leica Factory Museum are described – from the UR-Leica to the red anodized Leica.
- 672 pages with over 600 large size colour images
- Text fully bi-lingual (English/German)
- 21×30 cm, 2 sub-volumes in one slipcase, hardcover in cloth with dust-jacket
Additional information and pictures:
From LHSA:
The Museum referred to in the title is the Leica Factory Museum in Leica AG’s recently opened new home in Wetzlar’s Leitz Park. Included in the new books are images of rare cameras (starting with Prototype 3 and the Ur- Leica), many design studies, cameras that were developed but not commercially produced, unusual lenses, and various unexpected one-off pieces. The book’s subtitle states that items from the Rolf Fricke Collection are included; that is because Rolf ’s collection is now part of the Factory Museum’s collection. It should be noted that while the presentation of items is in rough chronological order, there is no attempt to be completionist in the manner of other surveys of rare Leica equipment. We are given many items, but all from the existing museum collection; some items are however portrayed in depth, with several images. The photography is again performed by Wolfgang Sauer, as in the immediately prior volume Rare Leica, utilizing a Leica S (007), with a 120/2.5 Apo-Macro-Summarit CS for all equipment images. As in the prior volumes, the images are lighted against a dark background. A real attempt has been made not to duplicate items in Lars’ prior books, so that all the books so far more or less dovetail with each other.
Lars Netopil won the German Photo Book Prize 2018/19 with the “Museum Leica” book:
‘Museum Leica’ details some of the most outstanding treasures to be found in the holdings of Leica Camera’s factory museum in Wetzlar. Composed of two hardcover volumes in one slipcase, the 600-page publication was launched at the grand opening of Leitz Park III in June 2018 – an event attended by more than 1000 international guests. Lars Netopil, who is based in Wetzlar, counts among a small number of unequivocally competent experts on the technical history of Leica cameras worldwide.
Leica Blog interview:
Q: Your new photo book Museum Leica presents a collection of hundreds of treasures from over 100 years of camera history. Could you tell us about how the book came about?
A: Since 1999 I have been working on and off as a consultant for Leica Camera, in particular, for historical purposes. Before the completion of the second phase of Leitz Park, I was involved in the collection of objects for the Leica Family Tree. The Leica Family Tree has been a classic feature of the Leica Factory since 1963, yet the technical evolution of the Leica System is shown via various series models. No factory museum lives only from the models produced in series. The rare gems are the “salt in the soup” and during the relocation of the museum and archive to the second phase of Leitz Park, I was already keen to store and secure these objects separately. At the moment the relocation is underway to the third phase of Leitz Park. Here, the conditions are fantastic, not only in terms of the exhibition space itself but also for the storage and ordering of the objects, which are not currently being displayed. With the move in mind, the sorting and packing of the exhibits alone required a long period of preparation. In the meantime I helped assist with the photographing of the exhibits, turning them from side to side in front of the background. When we were finally finished, standing in front of several large steel cabinets full of all the highlights of the collection, I spontaneously said to Günter Osterloh, “I’d like to publish that!”
