Est. 1941 · Gothenburg, Sweden · 9 lenses
Hasselblad's photographic lineage reaches back to F.W. Hasselblad & Co., the Gothenburg trading company founded in 1841 by Fritz Viktor Hasselblad. The family business became Sweden's distributor for Eastman Kodak products in the late nineteenth century, and photography eventually spun out into Hasselblad Fotografiska AB. Victor Hasselblad, raised around that photographic trade and already known as a bird photographer and camera enthusiast, founded his own Victor Foto shop in 1937 before the Swedish Air Force asked him to build aerial reconnaissance cameras during World War II. In 1941 the Gothenburg workshop began serial production of the HK-7 military camera, establishing Victor Hasselblad AB as a camera manufacturer rather than only a photographic retailer.
After the war, Victor turned the workshop toward a civilian modular medium-format system. The 1600F, introduced in 1948, used interchangeable lenses, backs, and finders around a 6x6 cm negative, but its focal-plane shutter was mechanically demanding. The decisive design arrived with the 500C in 1957: Hasselblad moved the shutter into the lens, paired the body with high-quality Carl Zeiss optics, and created the V System architecture that would define professional square-format photography for decades. Zeiss Planar, Distagon, Sonnar, Makro-Planar, and Tele-Apotessar lenses gave the system its optical identity, while interchangeable film magazines and waist-level or prism finders made the cameras central to studio, fashion, portrait, landscape, and editorial work.
Hasselblad's place in photographic culture became inseparable from NASA. Astronaut Walter Schirra carried a modified 500C on Mercury-Atlas 8 in 1962, and later NASA-modified Hasselblad cameras documented Gemini and Apollo missions, including the Apollo 11 lunar surface photographs in 1969. The association made the 500-series body and Zeiss lens modules icons of twentieth-century engineering as well as photography.
The company expanded beyond the classic V System with the Fujifilm-built XPan panoramic 35 mm rangefinder in 1998 and the autofocus H System in 2002, whose HC and HCD lenses carried electronic leaf shutters into a 645-format film and digital platform. Digital backs from Imacon and later integrated Hasselblad digital bodies moved the marque into high-resolution studio capture. In 2016 Hasselblad introduced the X1D-50c and the XCD mount, bringing a compact mirrorless architecture to medium format; the X1D II, 907X/CFV backs, and X2D 100C extended that system while preserving the brand's emphasis on leaf-shutter lenses, calibrated color, and carefully machined Scandinavian industrial design.
Notable designs: 500C, 500CM, SWC/M Biogon 38mm f/4.5, Planar C 80mm f/2.8, Sonnar 250mm f/5.6 Superachromat, XPan 45mm f/4, XCD 38V, XCD 90V