Fred Spira

Fred Spira (1924–2007) was an inventor and innovator in photography as well as a collector of photographic equipment, images, books, and ephemera. He is credited as one of three individuals who opened up the U.S. market to quality Japanese photographic goods.

Siegfried Franz Spira was born in Vienna, Austria to Hans and Paula (née Back) Spira. His father was an official at the and later owned the Photohaus Spira-Ritz. Spira attended the Amerlinggymnasium until after the Anschluß, when he was forced to leave school because of his Jewish heritage. In March 1939, he left Vienna through a Kindertransport rescue mission and, as a result, spent ten months in Doncaster, England, where he attended the Percy Jackson Grammar School. He left England with his father in June 1940, sailing to North America on the SS Antonia, where the two were reunited with Spira's mother, who had arrived in New York on the SS Volendan in February of that year.

In order to make ends meet, the family started Spiratone Fine Grain Laboratories, a photo-processing business, in their apartment. Spira worked for the family business as well as part-time for another photofinisher, while attending evening high school and graduating as the class valedictorian. His father died unexpectedly in 1945 and Spira, who was already attending college, left school to support his mother and himself.

In 1946, Spira opened a store on West 27th Street and started to sell a variety of photographic equipment, including cameras and accessories, by mail. In the late 1940s, he became one of the first importers to work with Japanese manufacturers in developing lenses, flash units, exposure meters, tripods, and other photographic accessories. Since his company name, Spiratone, had become fairly well known and the Japanese brands were completely unknown, the products that came out of these partnerships were sold under the Spiratone brand and Spira established rigorous quality assurance procedures to ensure that the merchandise that bore his name worked as intended.

Spira merged Spiratone with a public company, Interphoto, and the relationship with Interphoto allowed the company to expand its reach, in 1967.

According to Herbert Keppler, tests of Spiratone lenses "often proved them equal to or superior to that of famous manufacturers' own products."

Spira was also at the "forefront" of the technological revolution in lens attachments having developed a variety of filters and lens accessories that added unusual and special effects to photographs, and was "the most important" supplier of such attachments.

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