by Gerald Boerner
“Don’t shoot until you feel it in your gut.”
— Lisette Model
“They say my prints are bad, darling they should see my negatives.”
— Lisette Model
“Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.”
— Lisette Model
“New images surround us everywhere. They are invisible only because of sterile routine convention and fear.”
— Lisette Model
“Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in.”
— Lisette Model, Photographer
“The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know.”
— Lisette Model
“… photography is an art form which means: human beings expressing their understanding of and connection with life, themselves, and other human beings.”
— Lisette Model
“Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the powere of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of split second.”
— Lisette Model
“I have often been asked what I wanted to prove by my photographs. The answer is, I don’t want to prove anything. They prove to me, and I am the one who gets the lesson.”
— Lisette Model
“This photographic thing has changed the entire vision of the world. It will go through every activity of humanity – science, medicine, space, ESP, for peace, against peace, entertainment, television, movies, all of them – you will not find one without photography.”
— Lisette Model
“I am a passionate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images, it comes closest to the truth … the snapshooter['s] pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection which is exactly their appeal and their style.”
— Lisette Model
Lisette Model (1901 – 1983)
Lisette Model (born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern) was an Austrian-born American photographer.
Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria. Her father was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptized into her mother’s faith. Two years after her birth, her parents changed their family name to Seybert. According to interview testimony from her older brother, she was sexually molested by her father, though the full extent of his abuse remains unclear.
She was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in three languages. At age 19, she began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg," she said.
Her Path to Photography
Another refugee who had to stoop to hustling, scrambling, and scraping by, and ultimately to street photography to support herself, was Lisette Model. Although she came from Vienna, Model had a background similar to Gutmann’s, which gave her a Berliner’s perspective on life. She too had come from a wealthy family and studied painting before taking up photography. She had been exposed to avant garde art and unconventional ideas from the time she was a child, when her favorite playmate was the daughter of composer (and future emigre to Hollywood) Arnold Schoenberg. Like Gutmann, Model turned to photography at the suggestion of a friend who pointed out that with the rise of Hitler, it might be useful to have an itinerant profession.
Since she was living then in Paris with her Russian Jewish husband, this seemed to Model a good idea. With some instruction from Kertesz’s wife, Elizabeth, she set out for the south of France to try her hand at street photography. From the very beginning she sought out subjects who would suggest the corruptness of society. Pictures from the test rolls she shot along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice could easily be taken for caricatures George Grosz had drawn of cabaret goers on the Kurfurstendamm.
Like Grosz, Model saw her subjects as misshapen, almost beastly. A wealthy dowager is photographed at a moment when her face has exactly the same expression as her lapdog’s. A gambler sunning himself in a chair watches Model with a lizard eye and hands curled like the talons of a pet bird of prey gripping its perch. Model worked often in the late afternoon, thus giving us the impression that darkness is about to descend on the world in which these people live. When she got back to Paris, she continued her project by making pictures of the poor that complemented those she had done of the rich. She again photographed the obese and the grotesque.
Petite and refined though Model was, her photographs are as aggressive as an assault with a blunt instrument. Nearly all are the most direct of street portraits, head on confrontations with unattractive subjects. They have a brutal look whose relentless consistency from one picture to the next implies a universal brutishness inherent in man himself. It’s a look Model emphasized by always insisting on big (16 x 20"), rough prints. And in America she continued to see the world in the same terms, photographing both derelicts and society matrons, so that they reflected each other’s grossness. She found in American vulgarity the perfect counterpoint to the European decadence she had left behind.
Model says that she was shocked when she began developing her photographs, early in her career, “so great was the difference between what I saw and what came out of my camera.” It is this strange disjunction between the sympathetic and the predatory, in her work and in that of her successors, that both compels and perplexes us. Model speaks of her passionate response to her subjects, to the vitality they exude or the life they wear on their faces and bodies. In explaining her images of overweight women and men, for instance, she describes her attraction to large, round shapes. And yet somehow, wrongly or rightly, we infer a less loving and more ruthless vision at work. Something transformative is happening inside her camera—and behind our eyes.
Emigrating to the U.S.
She married Evsa Model in 1937 and the following year they emigrated to join her husband’s sister in Manhattan. There she supported herself as a photographer, having work published regularly in Harper’s Bazaar by editors Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch. Model eventually became a member of the New York ‘Photo League,’ which would host her first dedicated showing.
The only change that seems to have come over her photography was in the direction of a greater Expressionism, making her images still more like Gutmann’s and Grosz’s. Model began photographing reflections of the street in shop windows in a way that makes New York look like the town in which Dr. Caligari lived. She also started a series in which she lowered the camera to the level of the sidewalk to catch the blurry tangle of passing feet. This imagery is straight out of the bad dreams of a refugee from Nazism. The pictures have an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling, as if made by somebody who had lost her footing in a panic in the streets and was being trampled by the crowd.
Some of Model’s other pictures from the 1940s, in which she aimed up at passersby at close range, are a variation on the same theme. In one, a banker in a bowler walks under the statue of George Washington on Wall Street. The statue extends its hand in what looks like a gesture meant to keep someone on his knees from rising. A massive, grisly figure, so close that he is out of focus, the banker has a shadow like a bandit’s mask concealing his eyes. He bears down on Model as if about to run her over. She appears to be literally beneath his notice.
Thus does a misanthropy that began in Nice continue in New York until, in Venezuela in the 1950s, it seems to have come full circle to have become in effect a vicious circle – in some pictures that she took of life-size voodoo dolls. Sitting up in chairs, these effigies could almost be the mummified corpses of real people. (They look like the slowly decomposing remains of the guests at the Riviera hotels whom Model had photographed in their chairs along the Promenade des Anglais almost twenty years earlier.)
Like Gutmann, Model had a long career as a teacher but a relatively short one as a working photographer. Although she got a steady stream of assignments from Harper’s Bazaar for a while, those ended by 1951, and virtually all the photographs for which she is known were taken in the thirties and forties. In fact, her entire American reputation was built on those few test rolls shot on the Riviera. That she was praised effusively for such a meager body of work only made her initial success in America seem to her as specious and potentially transient as life had proven to be in Europe.
In 1951, Model was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend Berenice Abbott was also teaching photography. Model’s best known pupil was Diane Arbus, who studied under her in 1957, and Arbus owed much of her early technique to Model’s example. Model continued to teach until her death in New York City in 1983.
Honors and Collections
Public collections of her work are held at the following institutions:
- Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
- The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego
- National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Lisette Model that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisette_Model
Also see…
Masters of Photography: History of Street Photography…
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/M/model/model_articles1.html
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