[thompsonkirk]

There's more than one kind of Leica collecting, ranging from saving the rare survivors, to collecting cameras as if they were stamps, to manufacturing & marketing cameras aimed primarily at collectors rather than users. The levels are increasingly surreal, like moving from buying a house to investing in mortgages to dealing in mortgage derivatives.

The 'original' kind of collecting consisted of gathering the lesser-known or surviving pristine rarities (for example the olive-colored Luftwaffe ones). Fine with me, though I was less than amused when a friend bought store-type showcases to display his collection & stopped taking pictures with them.

Then Japanese collectors hit the market in the 80s with the idea of getting one-of-each, and Japanese dealers started bubble-wrapping Leicas on the assumption that they were to collect, not to be touched by greasy hands. If a weird American asked to unwrap it & try it, the transaction ended there. Dealers like Don Chatterton shipped many used Leicas abroad, & this kind of collecting sucked lots of good cameras out of the market. Pretty soon photography students couldn't afford one.

About the same time Leitz/Leica started making commemorative editions for all occasions, aiming them primarily at the collector's market. A definite change in business assumptions, probably good for profits. Nevertheless a bit surreal, if you thought cameras were mostly for taking pictures.

Finally the Hermes era, basically producing & marketing Leica jewelry as a gift item. Disgusting might not be an inappropriate term, especially for the 50 or so of those poor Nocti's that will spend their whole lives shut up in cigar humidors?

It's like when small town locals get a "Main Street Grant" to bolster a sagging economy. But often the businesses for locals can't afford the rent any longer & the main street turns into a row of interchangeable tourist restaurants & boutiques that have lost their local use & authenticity.

Maybe that's what producing wildly expensive gear for collecting consumers really amounts to: an inauthentic market for products that rarely enter the hands of 'native' photographic users. Cameras made explicitly to collect are not photographic tools, but some kind of 'virtual' commodity?