Steve Meltzer

After 140 years of photography, camera design has reached something of a pinnacle with today’s DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. But along the way to our digital era there were lots of false starts and dead ends. These were unusual cameras that had their brief moment and then simply disappeared.

In 1955, armed with a couple of Leicas, several bottles of French brandy, and hundreds of rolls of film, the photographer Robert Frank set out on an odyssey to look for the soul of America. Behind the wheel of his black Ford Business coupe, he drove over 10,000 miles of endless highways and forgotten back roads; and made nearly 27,000 photographs. From these road-trip images he created a “photobook,” a work that has had a profound impact on photography and photographers ever since: The Americans.

Ernst Haas was a pioneering photographer who broke through the black-and-white glass ceiling with his superb color photography. He changed the way color was thought of and how it was used. And the change began in 1953 when his color work burst on the scene when Life magazine published Haas’ stunning color essay about New York titled “Images of a Magic City.”

Photographer Josef Sudek is called the Poet of Prague because in tens of thousands of luminous images he captured the timeless soul of this city that is known as “The Jewel of Europe.” Sudek ceaselessly photographed the city’s streets, its forests and its atmosphere. But unlike Eugene Atget’s photgraphs of Paris, Sudek’s images transcend place and time and are meditative visions of light itself.