Six decades of the lens built for the light nobody else will shoot in.
Leica is marking sixty years of the Noctilux with a book. Noctilux: The Anniversary Book goes on sale on 27 November, 240 hardcover pages with 195 images, in German and English, at £50 or €60.
The timing is not accidental. It lands in Wetzlar during the Leitz Photographica Auction, the same sale we wrote about when Salgado’s Kuwait camera and Otto Steinert’s own Leica turned up in the catalogue.
What the Noctilux actually is
It started at Photokina in 1966 with a 50mm f/1.2, the first camera lens in series production to use aspherical elements. The name is the giveaway. Nox for night, lux for light.
The successor was developed by Dr Walter Mandler at Leica’s Midland plant in Ontario, and the family has kept going ever since, through the f/1, the 50mm f/0.95 ASPH, the 75mm f/1.25 ASPH and the 35mm f/1.2. Sixty years of chasing the same goal, which is to keep opening the aperture past the point where everyone else stops.
Why a monochrome photographer should care
Because this is the lens for the kind of light we keep writing about. An f/0.95 is not really about shallow focus, whatever the internet thinks. It’s about being able to work in available darkness at all, in the hour when the meter has given up and the only light in the street is one shop window.
That is exactly the situation where black and white stops being a choice and starts being the only honest option. Color at those levels falls apart into noise and strange casts. Tone survives. A lens that buys two or three stops over a fast standard prime is a lens that decides whether the picture exists.
It also comes with a bill. Wide open, a Noctilux gives a sliver of focus, heavy vignetting and a rendering that some people find beautiful and others find mannered. Nobody buys one for its corners.
What is in the book
More than a product catalogue, by the look of the contributor list. Peter Karbe, Leica’s Senior Managing Expert in Optics, writes on the history of aspherical lenses. Dietmar Stuible, who has run optics development since 2021, is interviewed. There are photo essays from Ana María Arévalo Gosen, Alisa Martynova, Jason Roman, François Rousseau, Paolo Roversi and Satoru Watanabe.
Roversi alone makes it worth a look. Physically it is 200 by 260mm, silver bound with foil stamping, sold through Leica Stores, the Leica Online Store, specialist retailers and the LFI Online Store.
If you can get to Wetzlar
There is an exhibition to go with it. 60 Years of Noctilux puts five past and current Noctilux lenses on show alongside photographic material, in the Leica Galerie at Wetzlar, free during normal opening hours.
One thing to check before travelling. Leica’s own gallery listing gives the run as 28 November to 24 January, while the press material describes an opening on the eve of the auction, which would be the 26th. Worth confirming with the gallery if you are making the trip for it rather than for the sale.
And if sixty years of fast glass puts you in the mood to use what you already own, the aperture is only half of it. The other half is deciding which side of middle gray the photograph lives on before you raise the camera.