Letting go with hope: old cameras find new homes
Selling cameras, lenses or a collection?
“A photographer parts with his trusted companions and discovers
the bittersweet feeling of letting go.”
10 December 2023
Munich. In Frank Schneider’s softly lit studio, a camera collection is being prepared for sale. A photographer drawn to the design of earlier times, he has spent years with these objects. Now they are ready to pass to another generation.
He gently wipes the dust from a Leica M3. “She was my first,” he says, with both nostalgia and quiet pleasure. For more than thirty years it accompanied him. “Every little sound, every familiar movement of the shutter release. I know them all.”
They say…
They say photographers fall in love with the image before the camera. For Schneider, it may have happened the other way round. “The weight, the texture, the mechanics. That was what first drew me in.” His eyes move from one camera to the next, as though he is saying goodbye to each.
It is a different side of the composed professional people know behind the lens. Today he allows the feelings to show. Each camera holds memories of a particular period of his life.
The first visitors are young photographers whose enthusiasm reminds him of his own beginnings. The sale feels like a quiet handover. “I am passing on cameras,” he says, “but also the chance for someone else to make their own stories with them.”
A young woman carefully lifts a Rolleiflex. “I’ll look after it,” she promises. For a moment, their shared interest needs no further explanation.
If the cameras could speak, they might recall darkrooms, the first light on old buildings, children laughing and landscapes before dawn. They would also have stories about the man who used them so attentively.
The next generation
The thought of new photographs gives Schneider comfort. The proceeds matter, but so does knowing the equipment will have another life. “A new beginning,” he says, smiling. “For the cameras, and for me.”
The day closes one chapter and opens others. The conversation between past and future will continue through shutters and rolls of film. In this small studio, letting go has become a way to make room.
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