Ihagee

Ihagee — history

Ihagee began in Dresden in the spring of 1912, before the name Exakta meant anything to photographers. Its founder, Johan Steenbergen, was a young Dutch merchant who had already worked in the city’s busy camera trade and secured a German patent for a focusing-stop mechanism. He called the new concern the Industrie- und Handelsgesellschaft, a practical but unwieldy title whose initials, spoken in German, became “Ihagee.” The first works stood at Marcolinistrasse 8. A surviving 1914 catalog still shows that address and the rising-sun factory mark, fixing the company in Dresden’s crowded world of small workshops, skilled woodworkers, machinists, and optical suppliers.

The early Ihagee was not an SLR specialist. Its catalog spread across plate cameras, folding cameras, travel cameras, stereo equipment, and roll-film designs in a remarkable range of sizes. Photorex, Viktor, Patent Duplex, Ultrix, Parvola, Corona, and many less familiar names belonged to a business willing to serve both compact amateur photography and large professional formats. After the First World War, Steenbergen brought camera-frame production more fully in-house by joining with Emil Englisch and six experienced woodworkers. The firm became Ihagee Kamerawerk Steenbergen & Co. in 1918 and moved through larger premises until its purpose-built Schandauer Strasse works opened in 1923.

Reflex cameras supplied the enduring thread. Ihagee made the Plan Paff and Roll Paff, then developed folding reflexes such as the Patent Klapp Reflex and fast-lens cameras including the Nachtreflex. These were not simply curiosities before the “real” story. They taught the factory how to coordinate mirrors, focal-plane shutters, focusing screens, interchangeable optical packages, and compact mechanisms. The company itself did not make lenses; it built bodies and systems around optics supplied by specialist firms. That distinction helps explain both Ihagee’s flexibility and the extraordinary variety of lenses later associated with Exakta.

Karl Nüchterlein gave those experiments a clear direction. He joined the factory in 1923 and became the central designer of the Exakta line. At the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1933, Ihagee introduced the compact Exakta for 4 by 6.5 centimeter images on 127 roll film, known today as the Standard or Vest Pocket Exakta. It combined serious shutter speeds and interchangeable lenses with a body small enough to travel easily. Three years later Nüchterlein’s Kine Exakta translated the idea to perforated 35 mm cine film and the 24 by 36 millimeter frame. The camera placed a waist-level finder, focal-plane shutter, rapid wind, and lens bayonet into a coherent miniature SLR system.

The claim that the Kine Exakta was the first production 35 mm single-lens reflex has attracted decades of debate, chiefly because the Soviet Sport appeared at nearly the same moment. The strongest specialist reconstruction places Kine Exakta sample cameras at the Leipzig fair in March 1936 and production in April, while the museum record independently identifies a German-made Kine Exakta from 1936. The careful historical wording is therefore specific: Ihagee’s Kine Exakta was the first series-produced 24 by 36 millimeter SLR supported by a well-documented production sequence. Its importance lies not only in priority but in the system photographers could actually use.

That system grew far beyond a camera and standard lens. Period instructions describe interchangeable optics, extension tubes, copying equipment, microscope attachments, finders, filters, flash equipment, and the Lumimax projector-enlarger. Outside lens makers turned the bayonet into a shared platform, offering everything from wide angles and fast normals to long telephotos and specialist lenses. Ihagee’s left-handed front shutter release also allowed many automatic-diaphragm lenses to couple mechanically to the body. The result was unusually adaptable for close-up, medical, scientific, and technical work, fields in which viewing through the taking lens had an immediate practical advantage.

War shattered the company that had built this system. Because Steenbergen was Dutch and his wife was Jewish and American, Nazi authorities treated the ownership as enemy property. Control tightened, the firm became an Aktiengesellschaft under coercive wartime conditions, and Steenbergen and his wife left Germany in 1942. Camera production largely gave way to military subcontracting, though a small number of Kine Exaktas were assembled for special use. Nüchterlein was drafted and disappeared during the war. The February 1945 bombing of Dresden destroyed the Schandauer Strasse factory, leaving the postwar workforce to recover machinery and parts and restart elsewhere.

Production resumed in July 1945 at the former Delta works on Blasewitzer Strasse. Early postwar Kine Exaktas mixed surviving parts with new production, a fact still visible in their markings and construction. Exakta II followed in 1949, and the Exakta Varex of 1950 introduced interchangeable viewing finders as a defining system feature. Waist-level and eye-level finders could now be exchanged rather than treated as fixed choices. Varex VX, IIa, IIb, VX 1000, and VX 500 refined the body over the next two decades while retaining a high degree of lens compatibility.

Ihagee also returned to medium format and broadened the lower end of the system. The vertical Exakta 6x6 of 1953 was an ambitious new body, but film-transport problems ended production after roughly 2,500 cameras. The Exa proved far more durable. Introduced as a simpler companion, it shared much of the Exakta lens and finder world while using a limited mirror-based shutter in its first generation. Later Exa II bodies adopted a conventional focal-plane shutter. License production of the System Exa at VEB Rheinmetall in Soemmerda during 1954-1955 shows that even within one model family, the responsible factory can change.

The postwar company’s legal position was never simple. Dresden lay in East Germany, but Ihagee’s foreign ownership initially prevented ordinary nationalization. From 1951 the business operated under state trusteeship as Ihagee Kamerawerk AG in Verwaltung. Steenbergen, living in the West, tried to recover control and eventually established a separate West German Ihagee company. Lawsuits over Ihagee and Exakta names produced export variants such as VX and Elbaflex. The two businesses shared history and contested trademarks, but they were not one factory. Ihagee West’s Exakta Real of 1966 used its own enlarged bayonet; the later Twin TL was a Japanese-built camera marketed through the western company.

In Dresden, a different transition was under way. Ihagee’s development department came under Pentacon supervision in 1964, the company entered the VEB Pentacon combine in 1968, and by 1970 the old works had lost an independent factory identity. The Exakta RTL 1000, made from 1969 to 1973, was based on the Praktica L architecture and retained selected Exakta interfaces rather than continuing the classic body internally. Exa production outlived the corporate name: Exa Ia continued under Pentacon, while the M42 Exa 1b and 1c ran through 1987, latterly at the Certo works. These are genuine descendants, but their maker and mount must be named accurately.

Ihagee West was liquidated in October 1976. Exakta-badged Petri and Cosina cameras occupied the market around this period, and later uses of the name continued without restoring the Dresden manufacturer. The old Steenbergen partnership finally disappeared from the register in 1996. What survives is unusually tangible: cameras whose controls still reveal Nüchterlein’s logic, a bayonet supported by dozens of optical companies, manuals that show how broadly the system was used, and an active international community preserving factory documents and serial observations.

From a 1912 workshop in Dresden, Ihagee moved through wooden plate cameras, folding reflexes, the Standard Exakta, the Kine Exakta, Varex, Exa, and a vast network of outside lenses and accessories. War, division, litigation, and state consolidation broke the company into several legal chapters, but the engineering tradition remains easy to recognize. No operating camera maker now continues that factory line. Ihagee’s lasting significance is the practical SLR system it helped photographers make their own.