Leica and Fender just released a very limited camera and guitar set for legendary guitarist Andy Summers. The pairing is comprised of a Custom Shop Stratocaster and an M Monochrom camera customized for the Grammy-winning musician.
Summers, a former member of The Police, is a deft photographer who has exhibited work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Beaux Arts Gallery in London, BLD Gallery in Tokyo and Milk Gallery in NYC, among other places. For the partnership with Leica and Fender, Summers literally combined his two passions. “After all these years of being obsessed with photography and the guitar, I now have the two things together for the first time,” he said in a statement. “I’ve always thought of my photographic experience as tearing pages from a book and then reshuffling the results into a new visual syntax, and the collage-forward design of the Leica M Monochrom ‘Signature’ is the physical embodiment of just that.”
The Leica M Monochrom “Signature” camera has a custom-wrapped leatherette collage of Summers’ monochrome photos, a glassy finish, silver chrome hardware and a red-line engraving of Summer’s signature. It comes with a Leica Summicron-M f/2 35mm ASPH lens with a vintage lens hood, a guitar-inspired camera strap and an Overweth bag. Available at Leica boutiques, it retails for $14,995 and is limited to 50 pieces.
The Fender Custom Shop Andy Summers Monochrome Strat is built by Masterbuilder Dennis Galuszka and features another custom-wrapped collage of Summers’ monochrome photos taken with Leica M cameras. It features a two-piece alder body, a one-piece riftsawn maple neck with a “’63 C” profile, 21 medium-vintage frets (with a red camera dot inlay at the 15th fret) and a bone nut.
“This Stratocaster guitar is also very inspiring,” Summers said. “The really incredible thing the Fender Custom Shop had to pull off was getting my photo collage on the guitar body. I still don’t know how they did it!”
The Monochrome Strat has three hand-wound Custom Shop ‘60s Strat pickups and unique Leica-style volume and tone knobs. It, like the camera, is limited to 50 pieces and retails for $12,500.
