Oskar Barnack (Nuthe-Urstromtal, Brandenburg, 1 November 1879 – Bad Nauheim, Hesse, 16 January 1936) was a German inventor and photographer who built, in 1913, what would later become the first commercially successful 35mm still-camera, subsequently called Ur-Leica at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke (the Leitz factory) in Wetzlar.

[1] Barnack was an engineer at the Leitz company and suffered from asthma, so he proposed reducing the size and weight of cameras in order to be able to take photographs in his travels.

For this to be effective, the camera also needed a high-quality lens capable of producing the larger format film's quality.

In 1923 Barnack convinced his boss, Ernst Leitz II, to make a series of 31 pre-production cameras for the factory and for outdoor photographers.

Input presentations must be an autonomous series of images in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between man and the environment with an acute vision and contemporary visual style: creative, breakthrough and innovative.