Not everyone has their own award named after them. The Oskar Barnack award, given annually to photo journalists, was initiated in 1979tomarkthe hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who invented the 35-mm still camera. Barnack (1879-1936) had the idea for it back in 1905, but it was not until 1913-1914, while he was working as head of development at the German camera company Leitz, in Wetzlar, Hesse, that he was able to transform his idea into reality.
Traditional heavy plate cameras were cumbersome to use and required significant preparation before each shot. It was impossible to take a "quick snap" of anything. Barnack's camera was a tough metal box that could fit in a jacket pocket and used a new kind of film, adapted from Thomas Edison's 35-mm cine film. In 1914 Barnacktooka picture of a soldier who hadjust put up the Imperial Order for mobilization. This was a new kind of picture—spontaneous and capturing a moment in history. Barnack had held up a strip of his new camera film and stretched his arms out. The length of film between his arms contained thirty-six frames, and this has been the number of negatives on a standard 35-mm roll of film ever since.
World War I put a halt to Barnack's progress, and it was not until 1925 that the Leica 1 camera was introduced (the name standing for Leitz 'camera). According to one historian, old-school photographers regarded the new camera as toylike, but over the next seven years almost 60,000 of them were sold.
