Two Leica MPs owned and used by Hollywood actor Yul Brynner sold for more than twice their estimate at the 43rd Leitz Photographica Auction in Vienna, Austria on Saturday (25 November).
The two cameras – original MPs from the 1950s with consecutive serial numbers – were often used by Brynner to take pictures on the set of films such as ‘The King and I’.
The Leicas were expected to sell for between €600,000 and €700,000 but both ended up selling well over the €1m mark.
Leica MP No 59 sold for €1.44m while No 60 sold for €1.32m.
The two Leicas were hailed as the highlight of the sale, but the lots included several more lots which sold well above estimates.
A Leica M3 prototype – serial number 0025 – sold for €288,000. It was expected to fetch between €200,000 and €240,000. The camera was built in 1953 but still used the M39 lens mount, perhaps because the M-bayonet mount was still being developed.
A black-painted Leica M3 “first batch” from 1957 sold for €120,000, twice the expected estimate of €60,000.
The sale also included a raft of notable Soviet cameras and lenses.
A rare Soviet FAS-1 “Space Leningrad” rangefinder camera built for the Soyuz space programme in the 1960s ended up selling for €96,000 much higher than the estimate of €60,000 to €70,000.
A set of three prototype M39-mount lenses from GOI (Gosudarstvennyi opticheskii institute or State Optical Institute) constructed in the 1940s sold for €84,000. The lenses set featured prototypes of the Orion 28/5.6 wide-angle lens, the famed Jupiter-3 50/1.5 standard lens and Teleobjetiv 135/5.5 telephoto lens, all in original wooden boxes.
A black-painted example of the first series of FED-1 Leica copies from 1934 sold for €66,000 – more than three times the expected amount.
A rare grey-painted Sport SLR built by GOI in the 1930s with a prototype 52/2.5 lens sold for €26,400, well above the estimate.
An FS-2 Fotosniper outfit built during WWII for the Soviet military complete with a modified FED rangefinder sold for €18,000 – three times the estimate.
A rare Kiev IIIA outfit, complete with a full set of lenses, finders, cassettes and filters in a leather carrying case sold for €10,800, more than three times the estimate. The set, from 1957, was only offered to high-ranking Soviet officials and never offered for general sale.
(For a full run-down of the lots, see the auction’s catalogue.)
Ukrainian photo historian Ivan Zotikov visited the public viewing of the lots ahead of the auction and sent these images of the sale to Kosmo Foto:
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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…But they are used, what is wrong with a new one, put your own patina on it?
Used by someone who took some genuinely interesting pics. They’re a part of photographic history.
I s’pose that is OK if you are interested in collecting cameras. But just unnecessarily expensive if you want to make your own pictures.