Fred Spira, at 83; shop owner popularized photo gadgets

By Dennis Hevesi, New York Times News Service  |  September 16, 2007

NEW YORK - Fred Spira, a photo historian and collector of photographic gadgets who is credited with helping to standardize modern camera equipment and making it accessible to amateurs, died Sept. 2 at his home in Queens. He was 83.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, said his son Jonathan.

Mr. Spira was the owner of Spiratone, a photographic accessories business that he started in 1941 as a film-development lab in the bathroom of his parents' apartment in Manhattan. By the late 1950s, the company had grown into a multimillion-dollar business, occupying a vast loft space on West 27th Street and a showroom on the ground floor. It sold lenses, filters, lighting, and darkroom equipment, but not cameras.

Because of his business success and his unremitting advocacy, Mr. Spira was able to persuade major producers to standardize photographic accessories and to make them more affordable. Amateur and professional photographers awaited each gadget catalog as if they were children waiting for a Christmas toy catalog.

In a 1979 article in Popular Photography, John Durniak, a former photo editor at Time magazine and The New York Times, wrote: "Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, and Fred Spira did not invent photography, yet both these men have had almost as much influence on their respective fields as the original inventors. What Ford did to our economy and culture with the concepts behind the Model A and Model T, Spira has done to photography with his accessory lenses, close-up attachments, and processing machines."

In 2001, with his son Jonathan and Eaton S. Lothrop, Mr. Spira wrote "The History of Photography as Seen Through the Spira Collection" (Aperture), which outlined the technological development of photography.

The volume was based on Mr. Spira's collection of about 10,000 books, articles, and documents written by or about prominent figures in photographic history, among them George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Co.; Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype, for which images were exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface; and William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the positive-negative photographic process.

The collection also includes about 20,000 photographic devices, some of which were in use only briefly.

Sigfried Franz Spira was born in Vienna in 1924, the only child of Hans and Paula Back Spira. After immigrating to the United States, he changed his name to S. Franklin Spira, but he preferred to be called Fred.

In addition to his son Jonathan, of Queens, Mr. Spira leaves his wife of 48 years, the former Marilyn Hacker; and another son, Greg, of Kingston, N.Y.

Mr. Spira's father, a Jew, had been a banker in Vienna. When the bank failed in 1929, he and a Christian friend opened a camera store. As the Nazis made inroads into Austrian politics even before they invaded, 14-year-old Franz Spira was barred from attending high school. He began working in the camera store, but only in the back, out of sight with his father.

In 1939 he boarded a Kindertransport, one of the trains that rescued Jewish children by taking them out of the country. He was sent to England. And then, joined by his father in May 1940, he arrived in New York. His mother arrived later that year.

The small photo laboratory that Mr. Spira and his father ran out of their Manhattan apartment was eventually ordered closed by the Fire Department. It had become profitable thanks to word of mouth among Jewish immigrants on the West Side and by advertisements in photo magazines.

In 1946 the Spiras opened their store on West 27th Street. In the early 1950s Spiratone became one of the first photo supply companies to import Japanese accessories into the United States.

Mr. Spira retired in 1987, and the business, which by then had been acquired by another company, closed in 1990.

"There will always be some form of recording of light images," Mr. Spira wrote in his book. "What shape it will take in the future has yet to be determined."