uhoh7 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Nobody associates Leica and skiing today, but Google "Leica 1930 Skiing" and you can see how Leica made skiing famous and skiing made Leica famous. That is not an exaggeration. After the war, the craze of great snow photography was suppressed along with Leni Riefenstahl, who played the genre to the hilt in stills and on film. She had a legendary feud with the "original" ski instructor, Hannes Schneider, who rebuffed her advances and ended up in jail and then fled Austria for the US. Stefan Kruckenhauser was perhaps the most famous Leica skiing shooter and one of the founders of the Austrian Ski Technique. Not a Nazi, he became a war photographer on the Russian front. He ran the national ski education program in Austrian after the war.
At Sun Valley, half the Austrian Instructors joined the U-boat prisoners, and the other half joined the 10th Mountain Division, which took very heavy casualties below the snow line in Italy. The first Ski School Director died on the Russian Front, while the founder of the resort became ambassador to the Soviet Union and spent much of the war in Moscow. They had been fast friends. A crazy world.
The same reasons the Leica is fantastic on the street, makes it equally so for skiing. I am reviving the tradition, hopefully without the drama behind the scenes
Leica Ski by unoh7, 90 TE.
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