I have recently been looking for literature on leica M users, either biographies or autobiographical, and found very little. Have any Leica M photographers,(or any good photographers of note) written down their experiences and published them. Are there any good books out there about photographers, other than those which showcase the final product.

-- Bartolomeo (andjesuswept@hotmail.com), March 13, 2001

Answers

Most of my books are works of photographers that happen to use Leicas, but offer little to no biographical information. One book that is different, is about a photojournalist that made his name in Vietnam, Tim Page. The book is called "PAGE AFTER PAGE" and is totally biographical. This person had absolutely no training or knowledge about photography, but found himself in Vietnam as part of some "travel the world" scheme, and landed in the middle of a war. In the middle of a spontaneous fire fight, some real photographer threw him a camera and told him to shoot anything. A shot on his first roll ever won an award and he was hired by a photo agency, handed a bevy of Nikon Fs and Leica Ms, and just like that, he was a working photographer.

The photos in the book only support the narrative, so the book can be considered a biography. It also was the bases for a film about Page called "Frankie's House" which was shown on A&E over several days, (it is 6 hours long). You might check this book out if you want to read background. Page also has several photo books on Vietnam, (he goes back year after year), and for this work he uses Leicas only, with a strong preference to very wide lenses.

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), March 13, 2001.

As a first response (I'm sure to find more books), I have a book by David Hume Kennerly titled 'Shooter' probably publ in the mid eighties. He used Leica M's as Personal Photographer to US President Ford, otherwise he mostly used SLR's.

In my (limited) experience of searching for good photo books, photographers are better at photography than writing!

-- Alastair Cowe (a.cowe@ucl.ac.uk), March 13, 2001.

Jean-Pierre Montier's "Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art" reads a little too much like a Doctoral Dissertation but sure covers the ground. HCB's own collected writing, "The Mind's eye" is more to the point, like the man. Among many others there are excellent biographies of Margaret Bourke White, Eugene Smith, George Rodgers and Robert Capa, who started with a screw-thread leica, though he used mostly Contaxes and a Rolleiflex. His own WWII memoir, "Slightly Out of Focus" was consciously written to be light entertainment, perhaps with a movie contract in mind; but between the lines, it's hair

-- david kelly (dmkedit@aol.com), March 14, 2001.

that was supposed to read "hair-raising" before the dread greenspun bug ate the ending.........

-- david kelly (dmkedit@aol.com), March 14, 2001.

I find that most photogs who write anything write more about their experiences than about their gear. You might look up David Douglas Duncan's books, since he wrote a good deal to accompany his pictures and was interested in useful gear of all kinds. He used Leicas a good deal as I recall.

-- Keith Nichols (knichols@iopener.net), March 16, 2001.