THE WISNER/ZONE VI HISTORY

I received numerous calls from friends and colleagues urging me to add to the story put forth in the article in View Camera of the Zone VI history. I respond, at the publisher's invitation, herewith. My association with Zone VI and Fred Picker, its founder, is ancient history at this point. I have long assumed that the Wisner/Zone VI history was common knowledge. The perspective of time has allowed me to view this history, as one should always try to do in life, with a sense of humor.

Every now and then (though less and less as time goes on) I am asked about the similarity of the Wisner designs and the Zone VI design, or "didn't you design the Zone VI"? Well, in a word, yes. Mr. Ritter's account of the history between the two companies is interesting and forgivably biased, as he was a loyal employee for years. It is also incomplete and in one important detail, incorrect.

I would like to say at the outset that I should be thankful for Mr. Picker having pushed me into the manufacture of field cameras. When we met, I was not making field cameras, but more of a studio camera. The company was not two years old. We were working on a project for Kodak and we had just designed an x-ray microfilm camera.

After meeting Picker in the summer, now over seventeen years ago, Picker called and asked if I would design and manufacture a private label camera for his company. We met in Vermont where he showed me the Japanese camera that he had been selling and told me about all the things he didn't like about it. With that and a number of phone conversations, during which I told him the things which were and were not possible, he and I developed a wish-list of the things we both wanted. That was his point of departure. He had a camera he didn't like, and he had a wish list. There were no drawings. Mr. Ritter's account that "the drawings were almost done and they went looking for a manufacturer" is wrong.

For the next several months I sat at my own drawing board (in the days before CAD programs) and drew the fourteen drawings which are still in my possession, in my own hand (one of which is reproduced above), of the design which Mr. Ritter correctly states had a considerable impact on the field-camera industry. Nearly twenty years later, we now build more than thirty models in all sizes based on many of the principles I designed in those first drawings. The Japanese cameras were clearly limited and unsatisfactory, the Deardorff, while an old and venerable design, had problems that I didn't like. I used the Deardorff as my own point of departure. I designed thicker bed rails, replaced the sheet metal platforms which flexed too much with wooden ones, made the rear bed to focus in both directions, designed the front standard so it could tilt forward at the base as well as back, and where Deardorff had limited front movements, made a front swing and shift which could be controlled from common knobs. The bellows could be removed easily, something my woodworker and I came up with. It became the first interchangeable bellows for a field camera. I put springs in the front-rise knobs because the Deardorff front standard kept falling down when you loosened them. Many of these early designs were admittedly over-designed, and later Wisner cameras have become lighter and smaller.

We built two prototypes (I still have one), brought them to Vermont and promptly got a purchase order for one hundred cameras. That was the sum total of the paperwork. No contract, no drawings, no engineering fee, no tooling expenses. Just a purchase order.

During the next months Picker marketed and hyped, and it was soon very clear that the sales of the new camera design exceeded his wildest expectations. During the next ten months my five employees and I developed tooling, vendors, more drawings, proprietary procedures and techniques and shipped exactly one hundred and thirty-seven cameras. These cameras are still under the Wisner warranty, which we honor, though we rarely see one. You can tell we built it because the nameplate says “Built by Wisner Classic Mfg. Co., Inc. for Zone VI Studios”

During this time Picker sold over three hundred cameras. Clearly we had a problem. Both sides, Zone IV and Wisner, called for a meeting in early spring. Picker and his partner, my board and I met in my office in Marion. We told Picker that if he wanted us to increase production to the level of sales he was making, he would have to pay for additional tooling, higher volume vender production and a larger labor force. He flatly refused, stood on a chair and yelled until he was red in the face. It seems funny now to think about it now, but I had never seen anyone do that before and everyone in the room was shocked. He fired us a few weeks later.

The company was now just over two years old, and I had just lost my biggest customer whom I had been servicing to the near exclusion of all others. Then I had an inspiration and made a quick decision. While standing under the shower at the Y after swimming my customary mile, (I wish I still did that) I conceived a new way for a folding field camera have an axis tilt. During the next twenty-four hours I designed the now well-known "Geared Axis Tilt" and “Parallel Rear Rise” and called my patent attorney. In the next days we built two prototypes and arranged to go to the Photo-West trade show which was only two weeks away. I left for the airport to go to the tradeshow in San Francisco before the prototypes were finished (they were overnighted to my hotel for the next morning). At the trade show I got no less than thirty orders for the new camera. I still remember most of their names. One of them, a school in Yuba City, ordered four.

Not twenty-four hours after the show opened Picker heard about the new camera, called my office and threatened to sue if our camera looked anything like "his" During the following months we enjoyed considerable sales. I also got many exasperated phone calls from Picker's new manufacturer about the troubles he was having with Picker; the fact that there were no drawings and the camera was having to be reverse engineered, etc.I also received many reports about Picker's difficulty getting production up. Clearly he was loosing sales to us, and one year later he kept his promise and sued us for the purpose of putting us out of business. He told me in so many words. One of his charges was that we "stole" his design. Clearly he couldn't demonstrate this, as he had no drawings and there were too many people who knew that, including all of his employees, all of my employees and his new manufacturer. Though the parties may not divulge the settlement terms, the suit was settled out of court to our satisfaction.

Picker is not here to put forth his point of view, even though his second, Mr. Ritter, is doing a pretty good job. Though we had our differences I respected Picker for his many admirable qualities as a marketeer, entrepreneur, perfectionist and an innovator, if not as an engineer and designer. For that he relied on others. Though our respective histories are thus forever linked from that period almost twenty years ago, and rather rocky at that, I nevertheless have no regrets considering how things have turned out. And Picker ultimately made a good camera as well as many other products which served his customers well while also being responsible in part for much of the early renaissance of large format photography.