Antique and Vintage Cameras

Antique and vintage cameras are valued by collectors for countless reasons, from the historical significance of 19th-century wood cameras to the fine optics of classic vintage Leicas. In recent years, Kodaks and Polaroids have joined the ranks of the most collectible cameras on the market, as has the Bolex H model movie camera. Cameras developed from the principle of the camera obscura, a simple light-projection box that had been understood for thousands of years. But it wasn't until the late 18th century that Thomas Wedgwood—his father ran the Wedgwood pottery in Staffordshire, England—discovered that he could make simple prints by exposing silver nitrate to the sun. That breakthrough led to a device to produce these prints, the camera. At first these machines were large and expensive, but over the next 100 years, a series of technical advances would bring cameras into everyday life. Technical advances would also change the camera’s final product, the photograph. Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre were two early innovators. In 1829, they formed a partnership and figured out a new chemical bath for prints, which shortened the exposure process to eight hours. Daguerre continued this research until he perfected the Daguerreotype, a print made on silver that was considered state of the art until the mid 1850s. Daguerreotypes and other formats (cyanotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes) were made with wood cameras, which were essentially camera obscuras with lenses, allowing for clearer image refraction. One popular type of wood camera was the box camera, which featured a meniscus lens—convex on the exterior, concave inside—fitted into the camera’s face. Eventually metal replaced wood in box cameras, and later cameras were covered with tooled or textured leather, or even made out of a new plastic called Bakelite. In general, antique box cameras were only used to take photographs during daylight hours, and there were no such things as close-ups or zoom lenses. But box cameras were easy to use, the device used to take the first snapshots, you might say, introducing millions of would-be shutterbugs to photography. Popular antique box cameras include S.W. Turner’s Bull’s Eye Camera of 1892, the patent for which was purchased in 1895 by George Eastman, who repurposed Turner’s technology to create the Kodak Pocket Camera, which used his 1885 invention of film. Around the same time, the Zar camera company came out with a cardboard pocket model, and in 1900, Kodak introduced the Brownie, the most successful box camera in history. By 1914, the idea of a camera with compatible film was cemented in photography. That was the year Oskar Barnack began experimenting with 35mm film—one of the prototypes he built to hold his film became the Leica I, the first practical 35mm camera, released in 1925. More improvements came when Kodak introduced the Retina I, the first camera to use a modern 135 film cartridge. Of course, box cameras were not the only tools available to photographers. Since in the 1870s, inventors had been experimenting with twin-lens reflex, or TLR, cameras, which had a reflex mirror at the top of the camera that allowed the photographer to hold the camera comfortably at waist height, look down, and focus, albeit on a flopped image. One early TLR was the Carlton, manufactured in the late 1800s by London Stereoscope Co., which was followed in 1929 by the Rolleiflex. Later, everyone from Zeiss Ikon to Kodak (its Reflex was introduced in 1949) to a host of Japanese manufacturers, including Mamiya and Yashica, staked their business’s futures on TLRs. If the antique cameras of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are desired by collectors, so are the vintage postwar cameras that came out of Sweden and Japan. The first Swedish Hasselblads were actually based on the design of a German camera that had been captured during World War II. After the war, Hasselblad manufactured the 1600F, whose name was based on its highest aperture speed setting (1/1600th) and shutter type (focal-plane). The 1000F of 1952 made a splash with American photographers, as did the 500C model, which was designed to be compatible with Zeiss lenses. Beginning in 1962, a Hasselblad camera was taken on every NASA mission, including the motor-driven 500EL/70 that was used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Jr., the first humans to set foot on the moon. But Hasselblad was not only camera to be sent into space. Also in 1962, a Minolta Hi-Matic was modified for John Glenn when he manned the first NASA spacecraft to orbit the earth. Another highly collected name in vintage cameras is Nikon, which grew out of a company called Nippon Kogaku Kogyo Kabushikigaisha, founded in 1917. In 1932, the name Nikkor was used to brand the company’s lenses, which were compatible with Leica cameras from Germany. Cameras became a product of their own for Nikon only after the war, when work on the Nikon I began—the camera itself was released in 1948. Camera collectors look for models from this period stamped “Made in Occupied Japan,” but their place of manufacture is not as important as their quality. Quickly, Nikons became the choice of journalists such as "LIFE" magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan, who carried Nikons everywhere he went during his coverage of the Korean War. By the 1950s, the Nikon S2 was the gold standard for 35mm cameras, and by 1968, a modified Nikon F was on its way to the moon, joining the crew of Apollo 15. Still, in the second half of the 20th centuries, cameras were also toys for the masses, and there was no more satisfying toy than the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95, which debuted in 1948. Improvements in these “instant” cameras (no more waiting for film to be developed in a lab) culminated in 1972 with the SX-70, which ejected a photograph that developed right before the amateur photographer’s eyes.