Introduction - Text 1
Picture a dusty antiques shop filled with old records, mid-century furniture, and vintage camera equipment. Picture, not by a significantly larger stretch of the imagination, a shelf filled with various lenses and cameras. If an amateur filmmaker is deciding between two 35 mm lenses, there is often a great difference between a nondescript lens without a maker name – and a lens bearing the name of Zeiss.
Lenses are classified by their focal lengths (35 mm, 50 mm, 250 mm) but they are also strongly defined by their provenance: the companies that manufactured these lenses.[1] These differences are often labels of degree rather than kind. While infinitely arguable, all things being equal, two 35 mm lenses will both produce images. And, as a century of cinema demonstrates, what one captures with a lens is frequently more important than the lens itself. But the imagination and understanding that a Zeiss lens will produce a “better” image than an unbranded lens is an interesting one, and an idea that often exceeds technical specifications or build quality alone.
This parcours suggests that these qualitative distinctions between lenses emerged over time, and that their central qualities were significantly shaped by the industrialization of lens production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. How did the industrialization of lens production shape and form lenses as objects? While many corporate histories promote lens development as a linear timeline marching towards progress, lens history – like all histories – is messy. As optical designer Rudolph Kingslake cautions in A History of the Photographic Lens (1989):
Any attempt to develop a strictly chronological approach to the history of the photographic objective is invariably confused by a hopeless mass of crosscurrents. It would be easier if each type of lens had been invented, developed, perfected, and then abandoned in a limited period of time, after which another type had appeared and been similarly treated. Unfortunately for the historian, but fortunately for the working photographer, the lenses available at any one time cover a wide range of constructional types.[2]
Kingslake, who was a founder of the Institute of Applied Optics at the University of Rochester and head of Optical Design at Eastman Kodak, provides a useful warning. Like many cinematic technologies, the development of lenses was not a linear process. But, even if optics was messy in its technological development, companies produced an incredible number of artifacts – advertisements, books, catalogs – that shaped both professional and public conceptions that lenses were, in fact, always improving.
In particular, this parcours examines the optical company Zeiss. Zeiss exemplifies the industrialization of optics and were a key player in the emergence of “modern” optics at the end of the nineteenth century. In contextualizing Zeiss in terms of early visual culture, this parcours situates the development of optical infrastructure that – while not intended for the cinema – supplied standardized technologies during cinema’s early international expansion.
The parcours is primarily concerned with the period between 1886 to 1915. 1886 marks the year that Zeiss began manufacturing barium crown glass, a material that was essential for the production of “anastigmatic” lenses. 1915 marks when the agreements between Zeiss and its international partners began to break down due to the escalating military conflicts of the First World War – a period of wartime mobilization that reshaped the global circulation of both glass and the knowledge necessary to make glass and lenses. With an eye to early cinema’s classic periodization of 1890 to 1915, this parcours will demonstrate how Zeiss industrial optics manufactured not only lenses, but the mass markets and value beliefs around how precision lenses should function.[3]
