Built between 1971 and 1975 in Wetzlar, the Leica M5 was the last M-series camera assembled entirely by hand under Leica’s traditional adjust-and-fit standard. Each body was finished, calibrated, and tested in the same small-team workshop system that had produced the M3, M2 and M4 — a method soon replaced by team-line assembly in Midland. When this process ended, so did the era of the “true” mechanical Leica.

From the earliest days of photography, cameras were hefty, complicated devices. Plates were large and unwieldy, limiting both portability and the opportunities to shoot spontaneously. Oskar Barnack (1879–1936), an ingenious optical engineer at Ernst Leitz Wetzlar in Germany, would change all of that forever.