Oskar Barnack's Exposure Tester

Reconsidering the origins of Barnack’s 35mm camera

In the accepted Leica origin story, Oskar Barnack’s first 35mm still camera began life as a practical exposure tester for his motion picture camera. This is often treated as a transitional stage: first came the tester, then came the Ur-Leica. In recent years, the little camera known as M875 has frequently been placed in that gap, as the supposed pre-Ur-Leica exposure tester that set Barnack on the path to the Leica.

But what if the gap is not really there?

In a previous Classical Eye article, M875 Reconsidered, we looked at reasons for doubting that M875 was Barnack’s 1912-13 exposure tester. Its physical features seem more in keeping with a microscope camera or optical test device from around 1920 than a pre-war cine-film tester. If M875 is removed from the early Leica sequence, a simpler possibility emerges: the remembered exposure tester may not have been a separate camera at all, but the first Ur-Leica itself.

This does not require us to deny the exposure-tester story. On the contrary, it may explain it better. The first Ur-Leica could have been built with two overlapping intentions: first, to make practical test exposures for Barnack’s motion picture camera; and second, to explore the small-negative, large-picture still camera idea that had been in Barnack’s mind since at least 1905.¹

Barnack’s own account

One of the strongest arguments against a separate pre-Ur-Leica camera is Barnack’s own testimony. When Barnack later described the genesis of the Leica, he did not present a sequence of earlier 35mm cameras culminating in the Ur-Leica. He described an earlier idea, a cine camera, the discovery of the usefulness of cine film, the decision to double the cine frame, and then the design of the Leica.¹

His account begins not in 1912, but around 1905, when he was still using heavy glass-plate equipment. Barnack recalled experimenting with a 13x18 cm plate divided into many small pictures, then enlarging those small negatives. The results were disappointing because the plate material was too grainy, but the idea had been born: a small negative might produce a large picture if only the material were fine enough.¹

Barnack was not merely a Leitz mechanic who stumbled upon 35mm still photography while solving a cine-camera exposure problem. He was an amateur photographer with an existing ambition: to escape the burden of large cameras and plates without giving up the possibility of a large print.

When he entered Leitz in 1911 and worked on cinematographic equipment, he encountered a material that changed the equation. In his later account, Barnack says that in 1912 he built his first cine camera and soon realised that the fine grain of cine film might solve the problem that glass plates had failed to solve.¹ A standard cine frame could give a tolerable postcard-size enlargement, but Barnack wanted more. For larger prints, the 18x24 mm cine frame was too small. Since the width of the film was fixed, he used the length instead, choosing what he called the double cine frame. Thus the Leica format, 24x36 mm, came into being.¹²

The significant point is that Barnack moves directly from the cine camera and the fine grain of cine film to the double-frame Leica format. He does not pause to identify an earlier 35mm camera. Nor does he say that he first made an 18x24 mm still camera and only later made the Ur-Leica. His narrative presents the first Leica-type camera as the result of the doubled-frame decision.

The January 1914 internal bill

In the late 1960s while translating Oskar Barnack’s original papers, Rolfe Fricke discovered a Leitz internal bill for a “Lilliput” camera, listing specific billing and component allocations.³ This was an internal manufacturing and accounting record showing that the physical construction and assembly of the camera had already been completed.

The bill was finalised in January 1914. If it relates to the first “Lilliput” camera, the camera later known as the Ur-Leica, then the implication is especially strong: the manufacture and assembly of the Ur-Leica took place entirely during 1913. It cannot have been a camera first completed only later in 1914.

This fits the long-standing tradition that Barnack’s first Liliput camera, later retrospectively called the Ur-Leica, was made in 1913, with further development and photographic use continuing into 1914.⁴

It also makes the idea of a separate pre-Ur-Leica exposure tester less necessary. If Barnack’s cine camera was in use in 1912 and the Ur-Leica was available by January 1914, the time window for another fully formed miniature camera before it becomes rather narrow. Such a camera is not impossible, of course. But if Barnack built one, why did he not mention it? And why does the surviving first Ur-Leica itself retain precisely the features one would expect in an exposure-testing camera?

Testing before the Ur-Leica

There is no need to assume that Barnack required a separate miniature camera before any exposure testing could be done. The most straightforward method would have been to test short strips of film in the motion picture camera itself. Such a procedure would have had the great advantage of using exactly the same transport, lens, aperture, and shutter conditions as the intended cine work. If the purpose was simply to find a workable exposure or to assess a batch of film, the cine camera could do that directly.

That possibility changes the question. The Ur-Leica need not have been the first means by which Barnack tested cine-film exposure. It may instead have been the first more convenient camera-shaped tester: a small device that allowed the same kind of practical exposure check without loading and operating the full motion picture apparatus each time. This would explain why Ernst Leitz III could remember a small Kino-Tessar-equipped exposure tester, while Barnack himself did not describe an earlier 35mm camera before the first Ur-Leica.

If early exposure trials were made in the cine camera itself, then the production of the Ur-Leica in 1913 need not mark the invention of exposure testing. It marks the point at which exposure testing and Barnack’s older still-camera ambition could be combined in a hand-held double-frame camera.

The shutter speed

The first Ur-Leica had two effective shutter speeds: 1/20th and 1/40th second. For an exposure tester linked to a cine camera, that makes perfect sense. The point would not be to provide a versatile photographic instrument in its first form, but to test film under conditions that matched the motion picture camera’s normal and under-cranking operation.⁵

The same feature can therefore be read in two ways. If we begin with the assumption that the Ur-Leica was already a finished still camera, the fastest speed of 1/40th looks primitive. But if we see the first Ur-Leica as both a test instrument and a still-camera experiment, these speeds become perfectly logical for the camera’s immediate workshop purpose.

The Kino-Tessar lens

The lens points in the same direction. The first lens used on the Ur-Leica is generally identified as a 5cm f/3.5 Zeiss Kino-Tessar, the same type associated with Barnack’s motion picture camera.⁴⁶ It was later replaced by other lenses better suited to general photography and to the larger Leica frame.⁴

Again, this is exactly what one would expect if the camera’s first function was to test cine-film exposure. To produce a meaningful exposure test for the motion picture camera, the tester would ideally use the same lens type and shutter timing. In that context, the Kino-Tessar is not a puzzling early choice; it is the obvious one.

The objection is usually that a Kino-Tessar designed for cine use would not properly cover the larger 24x36 mm Leica frame. But that objection only applies if we assume the first purpose of the camera was to produce perfect full-frame still photographs from the start. If the purpose was exposure testing, full coverage of the double frame was not essential.

At the same time, Barnack would immediately see whether the larger frame could be made useful for general photography. The Kino-Tessar could serve the testing phase, while the larger frame served the still-camera idea. Once the camera’s broader potential became clear, a better lens would be needed. That is exactly what the later development suggests.⁴

The double frame was not a problem for testing

A standard motion picture frame is 18x24 mm. Barnack’s Leica frame was approximately twice that size, using the film horizontally to create the 24x36 mm format.¹² At first glance, this seems to separate the Ur-Leica from any exposure-tester function. Why would an exposure tester for a cine camera use a frame larger than the cine camera itself?

But the objection is weaker than it appears. Exposure testing does not require the test frame to be the same size as the cine frame. It requires the relevant exposure conditions to be comparable. If the same film stock is exposed through the same lens, at the same aperture and shutter speed, the density of the developed negative will reveal the suitability of the exposure. The extra width of the frame would not invalidate the test.

Indeed, using the double frame would allow Barnack to combine two aims. The camera could perform the practical test function required by the cine camera, while also allowing him to assess whether 35mm cine film could deliver the larger prints he wanted from a still camera. In that sense the double frame is not evidence against the exposure-tester theory. It is the feature that unites the exposure tester with the birth of the Leica.

Barnack’s 1905 idea did not disappear

The conventional exposure-tester story sometimes gives the impression that the Leica began as an accidental by-product of cine-camera work. That is too narrow. Barnack’s 1905 experiments show that the basic photographic problem was already present in his mind: how to obtain large, satisfying pictures from a small, portable camera.¹

By 1912-13, cine film gave him a new material with finer grain than the plates he had previously tried. The motion picture camera gave him both access to the film and a practical reason to build a testing device. But the still-camera ambition was not created by the exposure problem. It pre-dated it.

This makes the dual-purpose hypothesis particularly attractive. Barnack may have needed an exposure tester for the motion picture camera, but he was precisely the sort of person who would not build a mere tester if the same apparatus could also advance his older photographic idea. The first Ur-Leica may therefore have been a test instrument in its first use, but a still camera in its conception.

What Ernst Leitz III remembered

A further complication is the recollection attributed to Ernst Leitz III, who remembered an exposure tester being used for the motion picture camera, involving a Kino-Tessar on a small camera.⁷ That recollection is important, but it must be handled carefully.

Ernst Leitz III was born in 1906. He would have been only seven years old in 1913. If he later remembered, or was told of, a small Kino-Tessar-equipped camera used as an exposure tester, it does not follow that this was a separate pre-Ur-Leica device. It may simply have been the first Ur-Leica in its exposure-testing role.

This is especially plausible if the early camera was known within the Leitz circle by function rather than by the later historical label “Ur-Leica.” In 1913 the term “Leica” (short for Leitz camera) had not yet been coined. It may have been, in everyday workshop language, Barnack’s little camera for testing cine film.

Only later, once the Leica had become historically important, did the need arise to distinguish prototypes, testers, and ancestors. At that point, memory and museum labelling could easily create a separate object in the story even where the original situation was more fluid.

The problem of M875

This brings us back to M875. If M875 really were Barnack’s pre-Ur-Leica exposure tester, it would neatly fill the traditional gap. But as argued in M875 Reconsidered, the object gives many indications of being something else: probably a microscope camera or optical apparatus from the postwar period, made around 1920. Its construction, unusual rear opening, and contextual fit make it difficult to treat confidently as a 1912 exposure tester.⁸

The label “M875” itself is not a Barnack designation, but an archive or museum identifier. Once M875 is assumed to be the missing exposure tester, every odd feature becomes part of the Leica prehistory. But if the assumption is removed, those same features point to a different function.

If M875 is not the tester, the simplest remaining candidate is the Ur-Leica itself.

A simpler sequence

The revised sequence would look like this:

Around 1905, Barnack experimented with making many small images on glass plates, then enlarging them. The results were unsatisfactory, but the idea of the small negative and large picture was born.¹

In 1911, Barnack joined Leitz. In 1912, he built or worked on a motion picture camera using 35mm cine film.¹² The need to test exposure for cine film arose naturally from this work. The earliest such tests may well have been made in the motion picture camera itself, using short strips of film, before any separate small camera was needed.

In 1913, Barnack built the first Liliput camera, later known as the Ur-Leica.⁴ It used 35mm cine film horizontally, producing a double-size frame. It initially used a Kino-Tessar lens and a 1/40th second shutter speed, making it suitable for the same exposure-testing purpose, but in a more convenient form and with the added possibility of evaluating the larger still-camera negative.⁴⁵

At the same time, the larger frame embodied Barnack’s older still-photography ambition. The camera was not merely a tester. It was a tester that already pointed beyond testing.

By January 1914, the internal Leitz bill for the “Lilliput” camera had been finalised, indicating that the physical manufacture and assembly of the Ur-Leica had taken place during 1913.³ In 1914, further photographs and further testing confirmed the broader promise of the format. The war then interrupted development, but did not extinguish it.²

This sequence does not require an additional lost camera. It does not require M875 to be older than the Ur-Leica. It allows Barnack’s own account to stand more or less as he gave it. And it explains why the first Ur-Leica has the very features expected of an exposure tester.

References

Oskar Barnack, retrospective account quoted in “Ur-Leica Prototypes,” Summichronica. The account discusses the 1905 small-negative experiments, the 1912 cine camera, the fine grain of cine film, and the decision to adopt the double cine frame. https://www.summichronica.com/ur-leica-prototypes ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
“Leica Century Time Travel: 1914,” Leica Camera AG. Leica’s timeline describes Barnack’s 1911 arrival at Leitz, his work with film, and the 1914 Ur-Leica milestone using 35mm cine film in landscape format. https://timeline.leica-camera.com/en/years/1914 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Leitz finalised internal bill for the “Lilliput” camera, January 1914, listing specific billing and component allocations. Discovered by Rolfe Fricke in the late 1960s while translating Oskar Barnack’s original papers. Editorial note: replace this placeholder with the exact archive reference, scan, Fricke citation, or Classical Eye archive note. ↩ ↩²
“Ur-Leica Prototypes,” Summichronica. The prototype summary states that Ur-Leica Prototype 1, the Wetzlarer Ur-Leica, was made in 1913, and cites James L. Lager’s account that it was first fitted with a 5cm f/3.5 Zeiss Kino-Tessar, then with other lens options. https://www.summichronica.com/ur-leica-prototypes ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Jorge M. Silva Espinosa, “Ur-Leica: The Most Influential Photographic Camera Ever Made,” gmpphoto.blogspot.com, 2 April 2018. This account states that Barnack’s motion picture camera used a Zeiss Kino-Tessar and exposure times of 1/40 and 1/20 second. https://gmpphoto.blogspot.com/2018/04/ur-leica-most-influential-photographic.html ↩ ↩²
John Wade, “How the World’s First Leica Camera Came to Be,” Amateur Photographer, 18 October 2025. This article summarises the conventional view of M875 and notes that the Ur-Leica’s first prototype lens may have been a 5cm f/3.5 Tessar borrowed from Barnack’s cine camera. https://amateurphotographer.com/latest/photo-news/how-the-worlds-first-leica-camera-came-to-be/ ↩
Ernst Leitz III recollection of an exposure tester for the motion picture camera using a Kino-Tessar on a small camera. https://www.filmportal.de/material/die-filme-von-oskar-barnack-und-der-fruehe-dokumentarische-film ↩
Andrew Williams, “M875 Reconsidered,” Classical Eye. https://classicaleye.com/blog/m875-reconsidered/ ↩