Leica in Porto – A View from the Iberian Flagship Store and Gallery

Walking around in Porto, two mirrorless cameras stuffed in my vest pockets – an old Samsung, I know but I am neither proud nor ashamed, and perfectly content with it under most conditions – and a new Leica TL2, getting acquainted with its quirks in action – I stop in front of this engraved inscription on the cement floor of a local store while passing by.  Even if this Harry Winston quote was taken out of the jewelry and watch context, it immediately and instinctively made me even more aware of that TL2 in my pocket. 

A Leica comes with many inconveniences that become apparent in everyday use relative to mainstream consumer digital cameras of the same class.  Take TL2, its latest and very intriguing machine, at last designed to gain the mind share of the younger customer in a pivot away from its old school, traditionalist look, anachronistic feel, and inconvenient UI.  In a nod to the touch screen generation, the TL2 hands over all control functions to the swipe, pinch, and touch motions and customizable icon menu on LCD viewing panel – Leica’s traditional articulated knobs, physical buttons, and manual dials all but eliminated in this minimalist model – as the German perfectionist closes the gap in other non-core features long available from its Asian competitors. 

And even the perfected TL2 is unforgiving and wants you to really know what you are doing, its image quality is quite lens dependent, its selection of lenses impermissibly narrow, its autofocus not as snappy.  Its generously sized rear LCD panel is not designed to swivel or even tilt for easy shooting from below, paparazzi style, or from above, when you need to clear an obstacle, or in a selfie mode – a significant handicap compared to the convenience of unobstructed shooting form a variety of angles afforded by articulated displays of Leica’s Asian competitors.  The LCD display simply can’t match the resolution, contrast, or saturation of its Asian vertically integrated electronics companies, keeping you in the dark when outdoors on a sunny day as to what exactly you have shot and whether it’s any good – not exactly comforting even if you know the image produced will ultimately be top notch in quality, sharpness, detail, color, dynamic range, noise performance.  If you think customers are demanding a discount for deficient UX or lack of articulating screen, think again – TL2, like other Leica models, instead comes at a steep premium – expect to pay for a Leica roughly triple what an equivalent Japanese piece would cost you, and a higher multiple if you include peripherals and a proper range of fast fixed lenses.  

But what a beautifully crafted piece, yet another case of German metalworking and product design at its best, this time in optics and precision mechanics.  Leica enlisted Audi’s industrial design team to define the aesthetic quality of TL2, its pared down next-gen camera.  Superb build quality, whether the underlying machining, polishing, final assembly, and quality control were performed by a steady hand of a craftsman, a computerized numeric control machine, or a robotic arm, the end result is stunning.  Leica makes its machine surprisingly intuitive in use, and it is not easy to make complex things look easy. The legendary firm started producing microscopes in the mid-1800’s, then some of the world’s most sophisticated,  and binoculars in the early 1900’s, developed the prototype of its camera in 1914, before WWI, and has been producing them at scale since mid-1920’s, and one with a swappable lens since 1930.  This 100 year old brand – it now appears indestructible – pioneered the small form factor design for a hand-held camera that would dominate the world of professional and consumer photography for the rest of the twentieth century, setting the standard for the 35mm equipment globally.  Leica was represented at one time or another as either the most established and the most expensive camera of the market.

A camera is, at least in part, about getting that tangible, palpable boost of one’s sense of self worth – and sensing it while shooting, is it not? If I am right on this, few things will make you feel as cool or as good about yourself as the TL2 body made of solid block of aluminum, hand polished for 45 minutes, its shape, size and distribution of weight just right, the cool, weighted sensation in your hand full of 24 megapixel, RAW format promise.  I bet those who are into premium mechanical watches by Breitling or Panerai experience this feeling of unshakable conviction in the purchase, having paid what often appears to be a mistake, an extra zero on the price tag – there is no hope to ever justify it on reliability and quality alone, a quarts watch is more exact by default, and the synchronized clock of the iPhone already in one’s hand keeps time even more reliably and accurately.  The price here reflects the intangible, extrinsic quality of belonging to a club, of instantly recognizable status symbol, the price buys more than a watch – a security blanket and a boost to one’s confidence.  Plenty of luxury toys that are priced irrationally somehow continue to keep their fan club under a spell, loyal customer and aspiring newcomer equally happy to overpay – just because they still, or finally, can.  When an object evaluated by most on functionality becomes a high fashion statement for some, constraints of reasonableness no longer apply.  Women must be very familiar, shoes with four digit price tags are possibly even more absurd – on account of their wear and tear, and expectation of variety, and therefore multitudes of pairs.  At least a premium old fashioned watch or a high end Leica M camera – in theory, has a long service life and potential collectible value – and is fundamentally singular.

Everyone loves Leica, and Leica itself clearly loves Leica – look no further than the ergonomic design of the shipping box in which the camera body was delivered, the graphic design of its packaging and user manual, the internals, the peripherals, the battery charger – the package itself offers a taste of the bespoke, the highly engineered, the ingenious – if the packaging is so cool and hi tech, imagine what must have gone into the camera’s opto-mechanical assembly, the coatings, the embedded code, the electronics!  But you are likely to be blown away by the very first and most basic step you encounter while taking the camera body out of its box, the unique easy-click anchor lugs for the carrying strap, and the innovative process of attaching them.  

Cult following or distinct product cult-ure? The clear connection in this case is more than etymological.  I am no purist or Leica fundamentalist, I am a very late and recent adopter, and only after the German sleeping beauty introduced modern UX/UI, and my newly adopted Leica is not my sole camera, at least not yet, just to make sure the sights and moments are documented somewhere, I still drag my lower pixel mirrorless Samsung, considered in all respects inferior, with me – just in case, until I gain confidence in it, and for real time comparison.  More importantly, Leica has always resonated – broadly and in a special way – with professionals and celebrities.  And after a few months of playing with my new toy, I don’t believe there is a better piece of photo equipment for a traveling snob, especially of inspired kind.

Turning into Porto’s Rua de Sa da Bandeira – crooked and with a remarkable near end but fading as it bends towards the upper end, this street is close to the Sao Bento train station the locals are so proud of but hidden from view of those disembarking on the Praca de Almeida Garrett – I stumbled on a familiar and comforting red dot.  I am talking about a building with the Leica logo, the name of the brand in white script on a small red circle.  Still new, the store opened a year and a half ago where historic Excelsior Cafe once stood.  A whole standalone store dedicated to the brand – how could that be? This puts Porto among the ranks of NYC and Boston, Vienna and Rome.  Lisbon doesn’t have one.  And as helpful Leica staffers explained to me, neither do Madrid or Barcelona or other major cities in Spain, Porto is Leica’s only retail location on the Iberian Peninsula.  Thanks in part to its 35 year presence in Portugal – home to Leica’s precision optical and electronic component manufacturing, recently expanded with a new factory addition to also make complete analog cameras – Porto’s industrial ecosystem and value chain no doubt played a role in that selection.  Logo aside, you need to get past the store front – a designer shipping crate in the street facing window, a projection on the window glass of a one-line computer-aided drawing of a Leica camera, reflections of facades from across the street all conspire to mask its fine historic interior.

Leica knows how to program its branded store – it does not stock, it prefers to program – to put on a show. Why come across as even more transactional than it needs to, it’s bad enough Leica already charges their loyal fan club 3x for the same product specs. Designed less as a retail store, it bundles the display of underlying product into an ‘experience’ as much as it can. In the age of Amazon and instant price discovery through mobile apps, what manufacturer would not kill to have Leica’s power to set the price and hold onto it, to be a little like Apple or Adobe or Tesla? Or taking the comparison beyond the confines of a B2C model, to have the pricing power of a Bloomberg, a 3M, a Mettler Toledo?  Pricing power is why nearly all industrial companies have been desperately trying to position themselves as selling ‘experience’ – at best with mixed success. It truly takes a brand people can’t live without and have to own, or a relatively inexpensive mission critical business tool without which the production workflows may be in jeopardy, the stakes simply too high to even consider switching to a cheaper alternative.

But wait, we are not talking about a firm that sells, with minimal competition, a must-have hand-held device that claims to have simplified people’s lives in an unprecedented manner, one that has replaced your flip phone, your browser, your wallet, your iPod, your flash light, your books, your laptop, and your camera, all at once, with a single device that fits in your pocket.  On the contrary, we are looking at a dinosaur of a company selling your grandfather’s version of a near obsolete product category that has itself been displaced, and in fact replaced, by Apple, made redundant, laughable, and practically useless for mass customer by Apple’s perpetually improving phone cameras.  We are also not talking about an item so small that price does not mater, a high-end camera is a very significant purchase that, instead of slipping through the cracks or escaping scrutiny, would require some deliberate planning and saving for.  A consummate marketer of old world charm, Leica somehow manages to brilliantly turn what should be its irritating flaws into a valuable asset people are happy to pay for.  None of this would be possible without the momentum of its cult following – or its culture of impeccable product design and flawless construction – reinforcing the notion that this is a top brand, not one people must own, but one that should remain out of reach, a luxury brand not expected to be benchmarked against its lesser mass market followers, no matter how superior their R&D function, or functionality or feature richness of its products may be. 

No, the Leica store instead resembles a trendy gallery hosting a hot temporary exhibit, or a Tesla show room, or a corporate booth of a top tier exhibitor at a top-tier venue.  Like the Automation Fair or CEBIT hosted by Hanover Messe or another world-class German international trade fairgrounds.  Leica provides a destination, an inspiration, an experience, a connection, complete with an espresso bar – the product itself, beautiful and iconic as it is may be, is secondary.  Leica puts on an exhibition it hopes its loyal fan club would appreciate – in fact, they are convinced the fan club deserves nothing less, and expects nothing less. 

It is a far cry from cramped Leica section of the shelf at B&H or Adorama – or, say, Centrum FotoSkoda in Prague – overqualified generalist personnel hovering over a narrow selection of new and vintage product and mostly pushing Asian product representing the bulk of the inventory.  Take Leica’s West Broadway location – I think I would rather shop at B&H and Adorama – its NYC store isn’t remotely as rich, nice, or inviting, a shoebox, generic, cold, dark, and uninspiring.  Stuck in an unequal battle with prime SoHo rents, and angry about it, that store seems to be in the business of perpetually discontinuing items only a branch like Porto has a luxury to carry, and running out of stock of whatever is not yet discontinued – so forget apparel or significant lineup, and I would not expect an espresso machine, a few inadequately looking built in shelves, not sure I would call it a store, certainly not a gallery.  In contrast, exhibits for the fan club on the Porto showroom floor include Leica’s entire line up of mechanical and electronic cameras, in full frame and smaller sensor formats, manual and automatic lenses, and accessories for each, in metallic and black finishes, plus a full range of sports optics peripherals – all grouped into a series of eye-catching bipolar display cases standing in the middle of the showroom, open to viewing from either side.  Professional lighting and props, filters and auxiliaries are exhibited too, and calling this stuff inventory would be an insult to the beautiful exhibition.

But it is a store too – a high-end lifestyle boutique, naturally with an espresso bar of its own.  Books, bags, apparel, and mostly useless objects but branded and of applied arts quality, provide another opportunity to admire the familiar logo – a paper cup stylized as a Leica lens? – they are no doubt offered as part of the ‘experience.’  And since true experience cannot be a mere snapshot, even when offered by a maker of still shot cameras, and needs to have a time dimension to be legitimate, why not also a bar counter – serving espresso?  A shiny, fully functioning, industrial-grade twin-cup espresso machine topped with branded Leica cups is planted on a counter top, next to the bar in the middle of the showroom – I did not try but I suspect one of Leica’s sales associates on premises would be happy to play barista, and may be even trained not only in the brewing techniques but also in the dark arts of making a perfect latte heart symbol, for the fan club.  No doubt this is a gesture, an attempt to acknowledge Excelsior Cafe, Leica’s predecessor that occupied this historic space.  More ‘experience’ is dispensed to Leica followers in the form of photography workshops and lectures that take place in the store.

Beauty limited to industrial objects risks of being perceived as too narrow and may require an explanation, why not add exhibits in a more conventional art form, especially that the company’s product is used to make art in such genre.  After all, they don’t call this location a gallery for nothing!  In the back of the store, a recently opened temporary photography exhibit entitled ‘Shades of Sensuality’ – an expose, tasteful and sleek but cool, provocative, and with an edge – nudes, by Tina Trumpp, a German female artist whose name alone would be enough to get attention, the same shamelessly oversize capital letters, but an extra P really helps! Two exhibits bridging the photographer’s end product and the picture maker’s tools of the trade – both exquisitely calibrated – the one in the back all about the soft lines of the object in the viewfinder, the one in the front all about the rigorous geometry and unimpeachable precision of photographer’s tools in the camera display cases.  Not settling for a retail photo equipment store or an outlet of Leica branded lifestyle objects, this place is a real gallery – of products that roll off Leica’s production lines, and of memories produced by those products.

A look back towards the front of the showroom from the gallery way in the back is one of affirmation – everything is incredibly well thought out.  The old-world charm is beyond doubt, is underwritten by a full-size, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling arch window that consumes the entire front wall but lets in all the ambient light, the high ceilings, the ornate moldings.  Everything confirms the first impression that hits you upon entry, in passing, it is intuitive and requires no reflection – looking for photo equipment you are instead forced to see architectural interior and the nudes – makes sense, the beauty of architecture, like the harmony of the human form, are among the most common uses of the camera.  Daylight illuminates the camera exhibition where ceiling track lights would never do Leica product justice and serves as no more than a visual bridge to the AV Tech look of the product displayed in the front of the showroom, while indoor lighting takes care of the photography exhibition in the back of the gallery, where content may be too sensitive to outdoor light.

I admire the nudes, the extra letter in the artist’s name, tease myself with high end lenses, salivate over optical components that could double the price of the camera – their price tag has a real bite to it, and there is really no limit, besides why buy here, this is really a gallery not a store?  I flip through a few amazing quality gallery catalogs – beautiful but too heavy, will check out online instead – and, after some hesitation, definitively convince myself that there is no real arbitrage value between a tax-free purchase in Porto and the retail list price in NYC.  Not sure this is what Leica marketing and planning execs had in mind – fan club expanded but no purchase and sale made – but I find their Porto flagship store and gallery a true experience, and tell myself I will now hold my Leica with a little more pride and a vague sense of belonging to a club, the Leica fan club.  I leave the showroom, deflated as if marked to market against a benchmark of superior toys, which beat my TL2 hands down, but newly inspired – by what low rents and a bit of imagination can do – and ready to take on Porto in all its scenic, panoramic, and architectonic beauty.