Website of the month: messsucherwelt.com
If you google Claus Sassenberg, you will come across a brief self-description: born in 1963, dentist, photography nerd, amateur musician, bookworm. Lives in Vlotho on the Weser. He has been running a photography blog since 2009 and explicitly describes himself as "fanatically endeavouring not to conform to any common cliché." You really want to believe that. And then he photographs with a Leica.
That sounds like a harmless hobby, and in fact that's exactly what messsucherwelt.com is, a blog without an editorial team, without a publisher, without sponsors. But behind this bourgeois façade lies one of the most thought-provoking sites that German-language camera photography has to offer on the Internet.
The name promises rangefinders, and they are indeed the starting point. Sassenberg discovered the Leica M system after years of growing weariness with digital "featuritis", as he calls it, and drew a double conclusion from this: to the rangefinder, and at the same time back to analogue photography. Both together result in an attitude, not an ideology. The analogue M6 and the digital M11, the Leica IIIf from 1952 and the Q3 43 appear on this page side by side with equal justification. This is not a contradiction that Sassenberg resolves, it is one that he lives out, and that is precisely what makes the site interesting.
The design is appropriate to the content: tidy, typographically careful, without the crowded effect of the usual specialised camera pages. Photographs illustrate the articles not decoratively, but documentarily, always with complete technical details.
What is the content about? Not historical documentation in the sense of a camera museum. Not current equipment reporting in the style of the specialised press. Nor is it about analogue photography as a sentimental counter-programme to digital technology. Sassenberg photographs with what he has and what he is passionate about, writes about it in detail and always places its practical use in a wider context. Why use rangefinders at all? Why still analogue today? Why Leica, when Zeiss and Voigtländer use the same bayonet, at a lower price? These questions are answered in detail on their own pages, and you can disagree with them. But the considerations are honest.
The centrepiece of the site is the ongoing "M-Files" series, now in its 28th instalment. It covers all cameras and lenses with an M bayonet that are not made by Leica: Voigtländer Bessa and its various variants, Zeiss Ikon, Konica Hexar RF, Minolta CLE, the Rollei 35 RF, right up to the young French brand Pixii. This is a niche within a niche, and the tone is accordingly: an enthusiast who knows his subject without becoming aloof.
There are also articles about the analogue Rolleiflex and the Hasselblad, the Plaubel Makina 67, the Zeiss Super Ikonta, and occasional digressions into camera history that should sound familiar to our members. These include an article on the Ilford Witness, the British post-war rangefinder camera of which only around 350 were made - a camera that was superior to its German counterparts in many ways, but failed due to poor marketing, and whose story also tells a small piece of contemporary European history.
It is also worth mentioning that Sassenberg now relies on a small network of guest authors, including Jörg-Peter Rau and Jonathan Slack from the English-language Macfilos. Slack's contributions are translated into German by Sassenberg himself, sentence by sentence, not by machine. That is an effort that deserves respect.
We recommend messsucherwelt.com to our members not as a historical source, but as a stimulating read. This is written by someone for whom photography is more than just an object, and who takes pleasure in enduring the contradictions of his favourite pastime - old and new, analogue and digital, expensive and affordable, mechanical and electronic - rather than resolving them. The fact that he uses the best-known cliché of the profession and obviously doesn't suffer from it only makes him more likeable.