The Golden Book of the Rolleiflex

by Dan Wagner

The Golden Book Of The Rolleiflex is a fascinating journey back to the 1936 world of black and white photography. Between its gold foil-stamped covers are award-winning photographs shot with Rolleiflex cameras by famous photographers such as Andreas Feininger, Fritz Wagner, and others. Surprisingly, most of the photographs are cropped as verticals or horizontals, instead of the camera’s square 6x6 original format. Sports, landscape, portrait, and street photography are well represented, and beautifully printed.

“The Home of a World-Famous Firm”

“In this handsome modern building, 385 ft x 62 ft, the Rolleiflex and Rolleicord cameras are produced. From this factory, which employs 450 people, 200,000 cameras have already been sent to all parts of the world.”

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book are the exterior and interior photos of the Rolleiflex camera founders, workers, and the factory located in Braunschweig, Germany – featuring two huge Nazi flags on the factory roof. Depending on how you look at it, the flags and all they represent can be hard for Rolleiflex camera users to reconcile. As one might expect, though, everything from the precision of the cameras, the well-organized manufacturing facility, the engineers drafting new designs, the machinists milling parts, and the assembly technicians are all equally impressive.

Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke, the founders and partners of the firm.

One of my favorite photos is the shot of the Rolleiflex founding partners, Paul Franke and Reinhold Heidecke. In this photograph, Franke is examining a Rolleiflex as Reinhold looks on intently. Looking at the orderly world they inhabited prior to the outbreak of WWII makes me wish it were possible to ask them what they thought of the ten-year period of history between 1936 and 1946. It’s hard to imagine a more turbulent time.