Voigtlander’s Avus and the Zeiss Maximar
Leaving 35mm for a while, we come to two cameras
made for 9x12 cm sheet film. These date from the time of the Titanic. I’ve been told that they were used by press photographers, as well as amateurs. They folded up and made a package the size of a small Bible, and gave you big negatives
for contact prints. But there was a problem:
if you carried five or six of the metal film holders with you, you had a load.
As you would expect, somebody began to manufacture roll-film adapters for these cameras, but that defeated the idea
of the big negative.
I picked up the Avus in 1980. I bought it from an advertiser in Shutterbug, when that magazine was a yellow sheet with nothing
but ads in eye-killing fine print. Out of the box, the Avus had the smell of
an old shoe; but the shutter seemed to be accurate and on front was a big peachy Skopar.
Where to get film for it? I went to my neighborhood camera store in Manhattan, which was Mario Hirsch's, and asked for 9x12 sheets. I expected
a "you gotta be kidding" reaction, but the people behind the counter didn’t blink.
As New York clerks, they must've seen everything, including people chasing oddball film sizes. They put in a
special order to Kodak, and in a week I had two boxes of 9x12 film: Tri-X and
Plus-X.
My first expedition with this outfit was to Grand
Central Terminal. I set up a tripod on the balcony and made a time exposure of
the main floor. Then I made some shots of the ramps that go around the Terminal
outside. It amused me to choose, as my first subject for this camera, a building
that was roughly its own age. I developed the sheets at home—in trays—and
then made contact prints. Wow! Decent-size
contact prints from a high-quality camera are something you don’t forget. A
couple of years later--when I had an enlarger big enough for 9x12—I blew one of these shots up to 8x10, and shook my
head in wonder over the developing tray. The long tonal scale, the detail and
sharpness, were beyond anything I had seen before.
To go even further, I believe that the best portrait
I ever took was with the Avus. I put a film adapter on the camera, and took a
head-and-shoulders shot of a model. We used styling and lighting to get a 1930s
Hollywood look, and the lens
of the Avus turned out to be ideal for this. The Avus’ lens is 135mm; on
a 6x6cm frame, that is a perfect length for portraiture. Plus, this version of
the Skopar has the delicate balance of aberrations and creamy scale that mark the lenses used in old Hollywood.
The result was what you see in miniature at the foot of this page. Imagine this 6x6 cm negative replaced by a 9x12, and you get an idea of what the Avus can deliver.
And the Maximar? Does its big Tessar blow away the Skopar? I can't answer
these questions, because I've used the Maximar only once, and I didn't enlarge the negatives. The contact prints were excellent and the camera handled beautifully, but...but...to be honest, the camera is in
such mint condition that I hate to trouble it! And besides, I have the Avus.
This is a dark
confession, because consigning an operating, high-quality camera to the shelf is against my convictions. Vintage cameras
should be used. The results are unusual and beautiful, and these old machines deliver an extra satisfaction with their
ingenious designs and hand-made quality. I'll get around to the great Maximar someday. Meantime, I'll keep
it close for those times when I just want to handle and admire it: "camera diddling," as my friend Woody Schwartz terms
it.
