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All Leicas have serial numbers, and these are laboriously listed on a website for collectors who want to find out exactly when a particular camera was manufactured. The number sequence of M3s is listed, along with a description of the hundred or so permutations: the batch of 300 black M3s produced in 1963 (#s 1078501 to 1078800); the batch of five M3s with green enamel manufactured in February 1967 (#s 1158996 to 1159000). We counted the rows – there were 110 permutations of the M3. Then we added up the Batch column: 227,608 M3s were manufactured.²⁹ That’s 227,608 instantiations. One of these, or perhaps several, would have been Cartier-Bresson’s. We don’t know the serial number of his camera, but it would have had one, and this is how we might be able to know without ambiguity that a particular camera was his.

It’s a definitive list, but at the same time ramshackle, typical of lists like this that keep getting added to over time. The numbers are not consecutive, because a new batch would often (but not always) start with 01 in the final position in the number, which meant there was a gap in the numbering whenever a batch was less than 100. The first model in the M series was the M3; the M1 and M2 came later. #1000070, our list tells us, was accidentally numbered thus on two cameras. The cameras NASA took into space are not listed; if they had numbers, the website says, they are presently unknown.

The M7 was the last film camera Leica made. Digital Ms have been manufactured since 2006, and by 2017 the model iterations had reached M10. But the details of the story, if you care to go into them, are much messier than this. For all the efforts to document the inconsistencies, one thing remains clear – every M is instantiable, and necessarily so if you are a collector purchasing one, or a store worker accounting for inventory, or insuring a camera, or reporting a theft to the police.

Here’s the Leica M3 schema in terms of our grammar of multimodality. The instantiation happens at a level we call “item,” whose meaning is established in the transposability of the irreducibly singular object, the camera, with its “proper name” (if you like, to use Frege’s flawed term,^§MS1a but only by way of language metaphor) – in this case serial number. We could also do the equivalent of proper naming with image. Sellers on eBay do this by providing photos of the particular configuration of scratches, marks, or other unique features of well used cameras.

The instantiation is the camera numbered or pictured or held in the hand. The concept is a level that we might call the “product,” definable at a number of levels of generality: Leica M3 batch → Leica M3→ Leica M → Leica → camera.

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²⁹ http://www.cameraquest.com/mtype.htm

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88-89. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

The Leica M3 §MS1.1.1b