Leica's new M11 digital rangerfinder camera may as well come from an entirely different era. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty modern. The M11 has a high resolution sensor (a 60-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame CMOS sensor to be precise), sophisticated metering tools, and even some of the usual digital accoutrements of cameras in our age. But it thumbs its nose at autofocus, and is perfectly happy to work with lenses that are decades old. 

More than that though, the Leica M11 just *feels* like, well, an old Leica. 

The M11 is very much true to the heritage of the M series camera. It looks like an M series. It's compact, understated, a box on which you attach a lens. The M11 doesn't make many promises, but those it does it keeps.

The M11 is also true to M series when it comes to price, which is high. The retail price of $8,995 is more that most of us are ever going to spend on a camera. But even for those of us who will never own a Leica M11, I think this is an important device that deserves something more than a simple review. 

The M11 is important because it shows that the engineers at Leica are keeping something alive, something that I think the rest of the camera world has forgotten—that the camera doesn't matter, the photographs matter. The camera is just a tool.

Any tool is only as good as the person using it. A wrench is just a wrench. Some wrenches may be better made than others, but if you want to do anything useful with a wrench, you need a person with the skill to use a wrench. That skill might come in different forms and guises too. I know what I'm doing with a socket wrench in an internal combustion engine, but I have no skill at all in using a plumbing wrench on the pipes in the basement.

In the same way, camera are tools. Put an outdated digital camera from the early 2000s in Sebastião Salgado's hands and odds are you'll end up with a great image. Put the Leica M11 in my hands and the odds of getting a great image are less in your favor. 

The reason I say the Leica M11 feels more like a film Leica than a modern digital camera isn't because it isn't capable, but because it has been engineered to be used in conjunction with human skill, that is, your skills as a photographer. This is what makes the M11 so different.

Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human skill, or more importantly the lack thereof, from the equation. From autofocus to auto white balance to auto metering, the engineering skill of most camera manufacturers over the last several decades has gone into replacing the skilled individual with a algorithm that presents, not a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. 

This is the path of all technological advance in our consumer society, the abstraction of skill to a set of features which claim to have removed the need for skill. And yet. Some photographs are better than others. Some photographs tell a story that's independent of technical perfection. No amount of autofocus speed is going to make your image tell a story if you have no story to tell.

The Leica comes from a time before photography became a means for social approval, and was about telling stories. Stories the world needed to hear, stories the world would not have been able to hear any other way. The work of photographers like [Sebastião Salgado](https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado?all/all/all/all/0) brought the rest of the world into my sheltered high school photography class in a way that nothing else I'd ever seen did. I would sit for hours leafing though *An Uncertain Grace*, staring at the same photographs day after day until I knew every corner of them. Same with [Susan Meiselas](https://www.susanmeiselas.com), whose sometimes shockingly brutal images brought home the conflicts in Central America in a way that the circus of Oliver North on TV (which happened around the same time) never could, never would. TV was sanitized. Meiselas's photography was a collection of raw emotion seared onto the page in way that no one could fail to understand. These were the things that made me want to be a photographer.

I don't want to give the impression that no one is doing the kind of work Salgado and Meiselas did. There are plenty of truly great photographers working today. In fact the winner of the [Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQteG83kQqo), Emile Ducke, is a great example. You know what no one asks in the linked film about his work? What camera he uses. You know what no one asked Salgado back in those days? No one asked what camera he used. No one asked Meiselas what lenses she preferred because it didn't matter. The images are all that matter and we all knew that just owning a Leica M series camera, which it turns out both Salgado and Meiselas used, at least some of the time, wasn't going to get you those images.

That's why I don't know if you should buy the Leica M11 or not. It's an opinionated camera. It's from a different time, when what mattered was the image. I shot with it as a loaner for one week. The highest praise I can give any tool is the praise I'll give the M11: It did what I asked it to do. It never failed. I failed plenty, but the tool kept on being the tool, waiting for me to rise to the occasion.









Today Instagram is like the TV, it's sanitized photography. 



lacks autofocus, or because it uses a rangefinger focusing systemmost of the engineering is going into trying to replicate human skill with digital smarts.