Photography expeditions in search of rare birds in his native Sweden started Victor Hasselblad's quest to invent an ideal camera. At the time, in the 1920s and 30s, cameras capable of making detailed images on film were cumbersome.
Experiments with a Graflex camera produced a book on migratory birds in 1933, an event which established Hasselblad's reputation as an expert pioneering bird photographer. When World War II engulfed Europe, the Swedish Air Force commissioned Victor to produce cameras for aerial reconnaissance. The resulting modular HK aerial cameras were revolutionary, but the pragmatic Swede would go on to make civilian cameras that to this day are the envy of anyone not an owner of these engineering marvels.
German surveillance planes violated Swedish air space and several went down on Swedish soil. One, however, surrendered its cargo intact: a fully functioning German aerial surveillance camera. Capturing a German camera, and knowing how to produce similar cameras were two separate things. A fact the Swedish government soon realized.
In the spring of 1940, the Swedish government approached thirty-four year old Victor Hasselblad and asked him if he could produce a camera identical to the recovered German one. Legend has it that Victor responded "No, but I can make a better one". That April, Victor established a camera workshop in a simple shed in an automobile workshop in central Gothenburg.
Close by was a junkyard, a resource that came in handy and supplied much needed raw materials. In the evenings, with the help of the extremely talented mechanic from the automobile workshop and his brother, Hasselblad began reverse engineering the German camera and designing what would be the first Hasselblad camera, the HK 7.
At the end of 1941 Victor received a new order from the Air Force for a new camera, this one to have a larger negative format and a fixed mounting in the aircraft. The military was extremely pleased with both the HK 7 and its successor, the SKa4, which had several unique features that would prove important for Hasselblad´s post-war production, including interchangeable film magazines. More cameras were to follow.
Hasselblad cameras have been used in every NASA manned space mission since 1962, capturing some of the finest and most fascinating photographs ever made. In 1969 the Hasselblad space saga continued with Apollo 11, and the first images of man on the moon and of earth from the moon captured by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr., with a Hasselblad 500EL/70. There are no images in the history of space photography more famous and more influential than those taken with Hasselblads.
True to form, Victor Hasselblad and his engineers used the advances and product developments that arose from the aerial reconnaissance cameras used during WW II and the NASA space cameras to add groundbreaking features and functions to the cameras they sold here on earth.
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