Swiss manufacturing and craftsmanship have left their mark on a variety of fields, ranging from mechanical watches to sailplanes and, in the case of small but noteworthy endeavours such as those of Monteverdi, even luxury sports cars.

This might raise the question: why, with the Swiss fascination for painstakingly realized mechanical marvels of precision and elegance, did the local photography industry never get off the ground in the little Alpine nation?

The answer is that it actually has – the history of Swiss cameras has merely eluded international attention, despite the high praise and success that Swiss cameramakers endured in their prime.

For a fateful, if neatly confined period of history, Swiss cameras occupied a notable niche in the industry and included some of the most innovative designs of their day. In the memory of many of these forgotten and brilliant machines, let’s take a stroll through history and uncover some of the greatest photographic success stories to come out of Switzerland to date.

A Timeless Legend: Jacques Bolsey and His Cameras

It is difficult to plot exactly with certainty where the story of the Swiss camera industry began. It is likely that it began similarly to the camera industries of many other European countries, such as Italy and France: with small workshops producing wooden box and view cameras in very limited numbers by hand throughout the late 1800s.

While little is known about the development of the Swiss photographic industry during this pioneer period, the documented history of Swiss cameras and their rise to fame does not start too much later, either.

In fact, one of the earliest and most monumental examples of the uniquely Swiss approaches to camera design – and their unlikely success – is the story of one man by the name of Jacques Bolsey, who began making cameras around the 1910s.

Beginnings, and the first Bol Cinegraphe

Jacques Bolsey, who was actually born as Yacov Bogopolsky, was not a native Swiss. He was born into a middle-class Jewish-Ukrainian family from Kyiv, the eldest of five children. The arts played a great role in the Bogopolsky household, and Yacov had a great interest in painting since his youth.

Around the year 1914, Yacov decided to move to Geneva to study medicine at the local (and highly regarded) university whilst pursuing his artistic passions on the side. This would prove to be a fateful decision to say the least, as the rest of his family, stuck in Soviet Ukraine, would endure a series of wars, revolutions, and anti-Semitic purges that Yacov was spared from in native Switzerland.

During his stay in the country, Yacov slowly adopted the name he is now most commonly referred to in historical sources – Jacques Bolsky. While juggling medical studies with portrait painting, Bolsky also displayed a love for photography and cinema, which were rapidly advancing and rising in popularity at the time.

Though exact dates are hard to find, some sources indicate that it was still during his studies, around the mid-1910s, that Bolsky first experimented with the thought of designing a camera. The story goes that one of his professors expressed the wish to somehow capture the open-heart surgery of a dog for research purposes, so Jacques went ahead and put together a crude movie camera to capture a few moments’ worth of footage.

It would take some more time until these nascent attempts flourished into a real, commercial venture, though. Bolsky abandoned his medical studies by the turn of the decade, and some sources say he ended up switching majors and graduating in mechanical engineering instead.

Regardless, the first camera design penned by Jacques Bolsky that went beyond the prototype stage would be the Bol Cinegraphe of 1924.

The Bol was a fairly simple-looking camera, taking on the appearance of a small, oblong black box with a fold-out metal frame viewfinder and a fixed lens. Apart from the fact that it took the then-unusual 35mm format for shooting stills, it seemed to be a relatively plain affair at first glance. But despite appearances, the Bol Cinegraphe was actually a rather elegant, surprisingly complex, and well-designed machine.

First off, as the name implies, the camera could not just shoot regular 35mm stills – it was also perfectly capable as a 35mm motion picture camera, made possible by a solid hand-crank mechanism on the side of the body. To aid the photographer (or cinematographer), the Bol also featured a built-in pendulum level by the viewfinder frame to align your shot, as well as a mechanical exposure calculator.

By means of a movable gate, you could even reconfigure the Bol to act as a projector for displaying slides or enlarging and printing negatives. Talk about versatility!

From Bol to Bolex

Suffice it to say that Bolsey had no intention of resting on his laurels. As refined as the Bol Cinegraphe was upon launch, it could not hope to compete as an amateur-friendly machine in the face of a new crop of 16mm movie cameras exploiting the economic nature of Kodak’s then-recently-released compact format.

Starting with the original generation of Kodak-made 16mm gear in 1923, the decade of the 20s would see an explosion of small film formats such as 16mm for home and amateur movie production – a niche that was yet in the process of forming.

Bolsey wanted a piece of that pie, so he teamed up with a friend-investor by the name of Charles Haccius and founded his own company, Bol SA, with the intent to develop a competitive 16mm motion picture camera.

That design would come to fruition by the end of the decade as the Bolex Auto Cine A. Clearly an evolution of the boxy Cinegraphe Bol, the Auto Cine A was a compact and well-featured 16mm shooter for the time.

It could accept up to 50-foot rolls of film, featured a built-in viewfinder for image preview, and could shoot a whole roll at a constant 16 frames per second thanks to a spring-powered mechanical motor, wound by means of a large key on the side of the body.

The Auto Cine A arrived with a splash and would be the beginning of one of the greatest success stories in the history of the camera business. Ironically, though, its inventor would only play a relatively minor role in its future development.

Relatively soon after the release of the Auto Cine A and its aptly titled revised follow-up, the Auto Cine B, Jacques Bolsky was approached by the Paillard company, a large Swiss industrial company known for its watch movements, musical boxes, typewriters, and other machinery.

By 1930, the two parties had struck a deal to sell off Jacques Bolsky’s business to Paillard outright. Henceforth renamed Bolex-Paillard, Bolsky himself would stay with the company for the next five years.

The first camera model in the lineup released after this deal is also the most monumental of all Bolexes, and perhaps of all Swiss cameras ever made. Named the H16, it was of course an evolution of Bolsky’s earlier designs, but with many notable improvements and additions, some recommended by Paillard after the acquisition.

This included the now-famous three-lens rotating turret design with individual lens mounts, which allowed cinematographers to easily switch between focal lengths in an era long before practical zoom lenses.

The film capacity was also dramatically increased to up to 100 feet per cassette, in addition to providing a revised clockwork motor mechanism which could, once wound by hand, shoot at a consistent framerate individually selectable by a speed dial, from 8 all the way up to 64 frames per second.

Other luxurious features, such as automatic film threading and frame counting, not to mention the handsome Moroccan leather-clad aluminum body, gave the Bolex-Paillard H16 an allure unmatched by its contemporaries.

So successful was this camera that it would spawn a decades-long lineage of Bolexes, which would absolutely conquer the 16mm market for almost the whole lifespan of the format.

Of course, Bolex-Paillard did try to branch out at some point – not wanting to leave all their eggs in one basket, presumably. This led to the creation of numerous 8mm movie cameras under the Bolex brand following Kodak’s introduction of that format during the 30s. Initially, these were more or less downsized variants of the successful H16 line (the initial model was aptly called the H8), but later on, 8mm Bolexes got entirely unique body styles and even lenses.

Later, postwar Bolexes in both formats would get such luxurious upgrades as through-the-lens reflex and optional ground-glass viewfinders, motor winders, and more.

All in all, Bolex movie cameras would continue to be produced well into the 1960s before meeting their eventual end as a result of the electronic revolution.

Still, the robust nature of these cameras, coupled with excellent, mostly French-made optics and battery-less, reliable operation in any weather, as well as the sheer ubiquitousness of the Swiss design, especially among high-quality 16mm cameras, all proved to define their unending legacy.

Bolex cameras are still a common sight in film schools around the world, and plenty of cinematographers and directors have made use of them for serious projects well past their heyday.

Bolsey: Finding New Fame in America

After selling off his original business and finishing his stint with Paillard in Switzerland, Jacques Bolsey did not give up cameramaking. Indeed, he deliberately orchestrated his exit from his erstwhile home to emigrate to the United States towards the end of the 30s.

Anxiety over the rise of Nazism on the other side of the border played a large role – prescient on Bolsky’s part, as much of his family would end up perishing in the Holocaust in the years to come.

After arriving on American shores, it did not take Bolsky long to return to work. Changing his name once again, this time to Jacques Bolsey, he founded the Bolsey Corporation, which set out to become a major player in cameramaking within the United States.

The resulting cameras, both military-issue as well as models for the civilian market, were mainly produced locally apart from a small initial run manufactured by the Swiss Pignons company – more on them later.

Because of this, many resources list Bolseys as American rather than Swiss designs. The fact that they were all personally designed by Bolsey, though, a man who made most of his fame in designing cameras while growing up and studying in Switzerland, makes this rather a matter of conflicting definitions.

If you choose to identify the American-made Bolseys as (at least partly) Swiss camera inventions, then they’re some of the finest. The Bolsey B series, the best-seller among them all, was an exquisitely-made, aluminum-bodied 35mm rangefinder with simple controls, a tough build, and a very highly-regarded Wollensak 44mm f/3.2 lens.

Many design elements about these 1940s-era Bolseys stand out as uniquely inspired by the imagination of the same man that penned the Bolex: the tough, yet light bodies using an abundance of aluminum and leather, the compact and handsome design that effortlessly blended form and function, and the reliance on not only a few, but a large number of simple mechanical systems intended to aid the photographer in numerous ways at once. The Bolsey B, for instance, included automatic double exposure prevention, a mechanical DOF calculator on the back panel, and flash sync by default.

Perhaps the strangest of all American-made Bolsey cameras was the last of the breed, the Bolsey Model C. This oddity was essentially a B-series with all the bells and whistles – but with a waist-level viewfinder that could pop out of the top panel in addition to the coincident-image rangefinder of the earlier model. This setup makes the C2 one of the few rare attempts at a 35mm TLR, let alone a 35mm TLR-rangefinder combination camera.

Arguably, due to the sheer weirdness of the design, as well as outside pressures that led to the total collapse of the American domestic camera industry as a whole, the Bolsey Corporation would not survive the 1950s.

As for Jacques Bolsey himself, he remained in the United States for the remainder of his life, drafting more innovative camera designs, including the late-50s Bolsey 8. One of the most compact 8mm movie cameras ever produced, it’s a highly coveted and intricate machine that was unfortunately doomed by the timing of its release, shortly before the immense success of Super 8.

Since his untimely death in 1962, Bolsey remains widely acknowledged and remembered as one of the most significant camera designers of his time.

ALPA – Luxury Meets the High End of Technology

Just before Jacques Bolsey left Switzerland for America, he would leave one last, defining mark on the history of Swiss camera manufacture during a fateful stint at a Swiss company called Pignons.

Pignons was interested in the design and engineering talent that Bolsky was quickly garnering fame for, especially among the Swiss public. They hoped that a man like him could be what they needed to branch out and diversify from their then-current business, which revolved almost entirely around the manufacture of, you guessed it, high-end mechanical watch movements.

With the expertise and fine craftsmanship inherent in such a venture, married to the genius of some of Bolsky’s caliber, what could go wrong?

The result of this unlikely relationship was a camera design called the Alpa. Based upon an earlier sketch by Bolsky called the Bolca Reflex, the original Alpa camera was a highly unusual beast by the time it was commercially introduced as the Alpa Reflex in 1944. Bolsky, of course, had already left the country by then and would not play a significant role in its future development past that point.

As for the camera itself, it was a stunning example of what Swiss craftsmanship could accomplish around that time. Bayonet-mounted Lenses from the likes of Schneider-Kreuznach and Angenieux, a head-turning design, and a price tag that even made the Leicas and Contaxes of the time jealous – everyone present at the Alpa’s initial reveal in Basel must have immediately understood that Pignons meant serious business.

But the Alpa’s greatest trick was very hard to notice when viewing the camera at first glance.

Hidden underneath its attractive chrome-plated body with the finely-engraved ‘ALPA’ script was not just an accurate, coincident-image rangefinder, but also a waist-level reflex viewfinder.

Whether this was intended as a sort of pastiche on the famous Asahiflex or simply as part of Bolsky’s apparent personal fascination with combining multiple different viewfinder technologies into one compact 35mm camera is up to you to decide.

In any case, the Alpa Reflex line would continue to evolve throughout the 40s and 50s under the guidance of Pignons. As early as 1949, the ‘Alpa Prisma Reflex’ was released, incorporating for the first time a true prism-based eye-level viewfinder into a camera that also happened to function perfectly well as a 35mm rangefinder. In fact, it became one of the first prism SLRs ever made, only trailing the Italian Rectaflex and East German Contax S by a hair.

Unlike those two, however, prism-based Alpa cameras followed an idiosyncratic tradition of placing the viewfinder eyecup at 45 degrees instead of in line with the horizon as we’re used to nowadays.

Throughout the coming years and decades, Alpa SLRs would continue to be made under the same MO. They would feature top-of-the-line, European-made lenses by only the best manufacturers, they would excel in both price, luxurious build quality, and mechanical precision, and they would be tailored to the needs of each and every customer, produced largely by hand in very small numbers.

Despite this highly exclusive and niche nature, the Alpa brand continues to survive into the present day under new ownership. Still channeling that same Swiss spirit, they haven’t lost their penchant for highly complex, yet elegant (and prohibitively expensive) machines – their latest and greatest include a series of medium-format cameras which accept both digital as well as analog backs in addition to lens movements usually seen only on large-format gear.

Tessina – Hidden and Dangerous

Not all of Switzerland’s most desirable and exclusive cameras were necessarily as flashy and extravagant as the elite Alpas or the equally luxurious, finely-trimmed Bolexes with their loudly-clicking shutters and imposing turret lens mounts.

In fact, one of the most amazing of all Swiss camera designs was deliberately intended as so innocuous that you could easily miss it.

I am, of course, talking about the Tessina, one of the holy grails of subminiature cameras from the middle of the 20th century.

To create a fully-featured camera that can operate at the same levels of precision and reliability as full-size machines without sacrificing ergonomics and usability is a task that many designers, if not the vast majority, traditionally wrote off as a fool’s errand.

Because of this, subminiature cameras have almost always tended to be cheap, sometimes even disposable affairs targeting the lowest end of the market. This only became more true as advances in electronics allowed for the creation of tiny, plastic-bodied automated cameras without any physical controls.

Long before that era, one small Swiss enterprise went against the grain. Siegrist SA was, of course, a watchmaker by trade – a pattern that you have no doubt picked up on by now. Sometime around the mid-50s, a team of designers and engineers working with Siegrist chose to embark on an unlikely mission: to create the end-all, be-all miniature camera, a device that would at the same time manage to be powerful, silent, pocketable, reliable, and usable by both a pro photographer as well as a curious amateur.

According to most sources, one of the most important figures spearheading this drive was an Austro-Swiss engineer called Dr. Rudolph Steineck, who had previously designed vanity and specialty miniature cameras, including one model explicitly intended to mimic the appearance of a watch.

With the Tessina, as Siegrist’s subminiature camera project came to be known, however, things would be different. Little, if any, compromises on usability and image quality would be tolerated. The design didn’t just have to be novel in its dimensions and appearance. It had to work and perform at a very high level, too.

By the end of the decade – different sources cite dates ranging from 1957 to 1960 – the Tessina was ready for production, and it was a marvel. Weighing in at just barely 160 grams, or 5 ounces, and just barely small enough to fit into a regular pack of cigarettes, the camera could definitely impress with its sheer compactness.

In terms of build quality, it also put most previous efforts at practical subminiature cameras to shame. The body is machined out of solid metal, with intricate chromed details and optional colored trim to give it a luxurious feel.

Several aspects of the Tessina’s industrial design are not just eye-catching and feel good in the hands. They’re unconventional to the highest degree.

For starters, this camera is a twin-lens reflex, one of the smallest ever produced.

By means of a top-mounted ground glass screen, the Tessina allows the photographer to easily compose with the camera held inconspicuously at waist level. Of course, the tiny area of the ground glass alone makes pin-sharp focusing this way nearly impossible, but thanks to the extreme depth of field provided by the small imaging area, that is hardly a con in most shooting situations.

Likewise surprising are the exposure controls: fully manual, with variable lens openings from f/2.8 to f/22 and shutter speeds ranging from half a second to an impressive 1/500.

Film advance is naturally executed via clockwork, what else? A spring-and-gear-driven motor advances up to eight frames in sequence and can be charged by one of the two prominent wheels on the bottom plate of the camera. For extra-smooth operation, and to reduce the excessive noise inherent in motor-driven subminiature cameras, the mechanism is finely lubricated and dampened using the same components you’d find in any high-end Swiss watch: genuine ruby crystals.

To make the camera more versatile, countless accessories were made to fit the Tessina. These included some rather odd choices, such as a wrist strap that allowed you to wear and theoretically shoot the camera while pretending it’s a grossly oversized Swiss watch.

Others were definitely more practically-oriented, such as auxiliary viewfinder attachments. These included an actual eye-level prism finder that you could attach to the ground glass, making the Tessina (optionally) also the smallest-ever eye-level prism-based TLR.

Furthermore, you could customize the Tessina with a light meter that clamped into a slot next to the ground glass – or, if you would so prefer, the factory could also provide you with a custom-made, working mechanical watch face to install there instead.

But perhaps the biggest surprise lies in the pictures the Tessina produces. Whilst the camera naturally takes rather small exposures as dictated by its exterior dimensions, they aren’t quite as tiny as you would expect, measuring about 14x22mm. That’s much larger than an ordinary 16mm negative, let alone the 8mm format used by most subminiature cameras! As a result, Tessina negatives record surprisingly large amounts of detail and depth compared to almost all other cameras of comparable size and weight.

It’s not just the imaging area alone that stands out. The recording medium itself is one unheard of in cameras of this type: good old 35mm. This was significant in a period where almost all subminiature cameras either relied on unconventional standards sourced from the motion picture industry, or even worse, entirely proprietary formats which came with their own spools, cassettes, and development requirements.

Tessina film, on the other hand, could easily be processed at any photo lab that accepted regular 35mm film. Understandably, this advantage became the centerpiece of almost all Tessina marketing campaigns during its time.

Making that film fit into a camera barely larger than two ordinary 35mm cassettes stood side-by-side required designers to make some compromises – namely, to reduce the image area to the aforementioned 14×22, essentially cropping a regular full frame, and to deliver the 35mm film within special, Tessina-only cassettes instead of the Kodak type that we’re all used to.

These cassettes were specially invented to fit snugly into the diminutive body of the Tessina, and do so whilst still leaving enough room for up to 24 exposures. Of course, the custom nature of this approach means that each and every roll of Tessina film must be hand-wound into its special cassette in the darkroom.

At the time that the camera was available brand-new, you could get pre-loaded Tessina cartridges straight from the factory. Today, enthusiasts who continue to keep the Tessina alive do so by either manually rolling their film in the dark or by using a special bulk loading accessory that was also optionally available for the camera when new.

Speaking of which, the Tessina’s legacy is immense and stands out even when compared to some of Swiss camera history’s biggest successes. Due to its compact nature, useful 35mm negatives, and smooth and quiet action, Tessinas saw plenty of silent service over many decades.

For example, the East German Stasi, the notorious secret police service, used Tessinas to spy on the populace undetected for years. Other spy agencies also utilized Tessinas. Most infamously, the government agents involved in the espionage and sabotage that led to the Watergate scandal in the 70s used Tessina cameras issued by the CIA for collecting evidence.

Whether it was because of the infamy the Tessina gained over the years, the sheer uniqueness of its design, the commendable build quality of its construction, or simply how nice it feels to shoot, the little Swiss marvel actually ended up breaking some records for longevity. Tessinas were in continuous production from the late 1950s all the way to 1998, and according to some sources, even a few years into the new millennium.

Throughout this half-century or so, very little changed about the Tessina apart from the availability of special accessories and color and trim options. Considering that fact, the Tessina ended up becoming one of the longest-lived cameras (and indeed one of the most long-lived industrial designs overall) ever produced.

Swiss Cameras Today

I hope this coverage of some of the all-time highlights of the Swiss camera industry was enough to give you an idea of how monumental the little Alpine Confederation has been in the development of unique and groundbreaking picture-takers.

This legacy, of course, continues to play its role into the present day. I already mentioned, for instance, how some of the Swiss camera world’s greats, such as Alpa, continue to make highly exclusive and advanced camera bodies for their stable clientele of well-off, demanding creative photographers.

Meanwhile, many of the Swiss camera pantheon’s historic greats, such as the Tessina, continue to attract a loyal following of enthusiasts, collectors, and users long past their prime.

Together, this all goes to show how photography evolved in jumps both large and small in many corners of the world – even those less celebrated for it today.