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Ballaigues is a village in the Jura, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, and in the 1930s its industry was pinions: the small toothed wheels inside watches. Pignons S.A. made them. It is not obvious why a maker of watch gears would take on a 35mm camera, except that a camera is a box of small precise parts and Switzerland in 1939 had more capacity for making small precise parts than customers for them. When Jacques Bolsky, born Yakov Bogopolsky in Kiev and already the designer of the Bolex cine camera, offered a reflex he called the Bolca, Pignons bought the rights.
A reflex with a rangefinder
Bolsky’s idea was to give a single-lens reflex a coupled rangefinder as well. Almost nobody else ever did this, for the good reason that a reflex already focuses through the lens, but in 1944 a reflex screen was dim and a rangefinder was quick, and the Alpa Reflex offered both: a waist-level hood over the ground glass and a separate horizontal rangefinder with its own eyepiece, coupled to the lens. The shutter ran from 1 second to 1/1000, and the lens was an Angénieux 50mm f/2.9 that collapsed into the body, which you could only do with the mirror raised. The first cameras were numbered from 120001, six digits, by mistake. Pignons built 115 of them in 1944 and 434 the next year.
Mike Eckman shot a 1948 example and found what everyone finds: a compact, beautifully finished machine whose speed dial is wedged between the rewind knob and the hood, and whose two eyepieces are far enough apart that focusing and framing is a two-step operation. The Prisma Reflex of 1949 put a roof prism over the screen with the eyepiece tilted at 45 degrees, so you looked down into the camera at an angle rather than straight ahead. Pignons liked this so much it kept it for fifteen years.
Model numbers that are features
In 1952 the body became a grey die-casting and the range became a set of numbers. The 4 had a waist-level hood and a plain eye-level window, for copy stands and microscopes. The 5 had the tilted prism. The 6 added a split-image spot to the prism’s screen. The 7 added the coupled rangefinder back, with masks for 50, 90 and 135mm, and is the last single-lens reflex anyone made with one. An a meant a self-timer and a b meant a lever wind, and these went on being built to order into the 1980s in numbers Pignons recorded to the unit: 93 model 4bs between 1959 and 1989.
The lens that arrived with this generation is the reason the cameras are still bought. Kern of Aarau, a maker of surveying instruments, designed the Switar 50mm f/1.8 as a seven-element apochromat, corrected for three colours, which no other standard lens of 1951 claimed. In 1958 it became the Macro-Switar, focusing to 28 centimetres with a depth-of-field scale of yellow dots that appear as the aperture closes, and in 1968 an eight-element f/1.9 in black. A model 7 with the Switar cost $469 in America in 1952, when the average salary was $3,500. Eckman found the Switar as sharp and colour-true as anything from Wetzlar or Tokyo, and the 45-degree finder awkward every time the camera turned from landscape to portrait.
Facing forward
The 6c of 1960 finally looked straight ahead, and put a selenium cell where the second finder had been. The 9d of 1965 put cadmium-sulphide cells inside the prism and read the exposure through the lens, with a second cell facing the eyepiece to subtract the light that enters there, so the needle told the truth with no eye at the finder. That refinement took the rest of the industry a decade. The 10d of 1968 cast the prism into the body and gave the meter a second needle in a window under the shoe, so exposure could be set from above. James Tocchio’s phrase for the 10d is the one I would use for the whole marque: over-engineered in nearly every way, deliberately robust and incomparably precise, with a dim finder and a film-speed control you can knock by pressing the speed dial.
The 11 series of 1971 replaced the needle with two lamps and the cadmium sulphide with silicon, and then Pignons ran out of road. The regular 11 models were made in numbers that would embarrass a limited edition: 1,228 11e, 1,163 11el, 1,288 11si, of which 160 were gold-plated and twelve were veneered in wood. More than half the 11-series bodies were finderless technical cameras for reading utility meters and copying microfilm. The last serial numbers, around 1990, were in the 64,000s. Pignons went bankrupt that year. Some forty thousand cameras in forty-six years, David Young’s history reckons; a Japanese maker did that in a month.
What it was for
I do not think the Alpa was ever a good idea as a camera. It was a superb idea as an object. Every generation fits the same bayonet, so a Kern lens from 1951 mounts on an 11si from 1985. Every body was hand-fitted, and the records the dealers transcribe say who got a green 6c and how many 9ds were red. The lenses came from Kern, Angénieux, Schneider, Kinoptik, Old Delft and Kilfitt, each with its own name for the Alpa version, and Pignons sold them all in a catalogue written for people who photographed in theatres and laboratories and did not mind paying. The pages here carry the lenses too, twenty-five of them, most with the production figures nobody published left honestly blank. If you want a camera that works like a Leica, buy a Leica. If you want to understand what a watchmaker thinks a camera should be, this is the only place to look.