 "With a Leica camera you can do anything," agreed
Henri Cartier-Bresson, an early Leica photographer, who once
compared the prestigious German camera to a 'big passionate kiss, or
then again like a pistol shot or the couch of a psychoanalyst."
As his testimonial shows, since the first successful Leica 35mm
camera, GmbH with its precision lenses still has cult following with
today's generation of photographers
Leica cameras have been behind some of the 20th century's most famous
photos: the young Vietnamese girl running naked,
American soldiers storming Omaha beach in the Normandy landings by
Robert Capa and point-blank execution of a Vietcong
prisoner
At the beginning of 1999 Hanns-Peter Cohn became the
new CEO of Leica Camera. The new management team developed a
strategy for the new millennium, which it referred to as 'Leica 21.'
One of its cornerstones was the brand-new Leica S1 series of digital
scanner cameras. This was a first step into another revolution in
photography: the age of computer-based image recording and
processing that did not require the 35-mm film that made Leica a
legend. Whether this new direction would succeed remained to be
seen. Regardless, Leica remained one of the most important and
influential brands of the 19th and 20th centuries
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