Lisette Model Austrian-American, 1901-1983

Lisette Model (1901 - 1983) was an Austrian-born American photographer and a leading figure in 20th-century documentary photography. Frank and unsentimental, she worked candidly and often unseen, pitiless toward the wealthy French tourists on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and unsparing but never cruel toward the residents of New York's Lower East Side. Her work was influential to late 20th-century American photography.

Born in Vienna to a Catholic mother and well-to-do Jewish father, Model received a bourgeois upbringing. At age nineteen she began studying music under avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951), whom she called her one great teaching influence. Bruce Silverstein Gallery paired her photographs with Schoenberg's compositions in Songs and the Sky (2016), an exhibition of art and music.

The German Expressionist interest in cognitive dissonance, societal vulnerabilities, and primal human nature runs throughout her photography. The gallery explored this connection in the 2011 exhibition Self Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model, pairing her work with pieces by German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 - 1938) and George Grosz (1893 - 1959). Like Grosz, she turned the caricaturist's distortion on the wealthy, photographing from below and at close range so that the sunbathers of Nice loom and sag; she photographed the poor without it. Her Viennese upbringing amid European bourgeois excess and mounting sociopolitical turbulence shaped that social critique and prompted her move to America in 1938. Model's success, recognition, and prolific teaching career in America established her as a conduit between early 20th-century German Expressionism and later 20th-century American street photography.

In the United States, Alexey Brodovitch introduced her to MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall, who acquired her work in 1940 and included it in the museum's inaugural photography exhibition; the Photo League gave her her first solo show in 1941. Series like Reflections and Running Legs captured American capitalist culture through shop-window reflections and cropped images of commuters' legs, work that led to a long collaboration with Harper's Bazaar from 1941 to 1955. Her photographs of Sammy's Bowery Follies, a nightclub among the flophouses of the Bowery that drew both downtown performers and uptown thrill-seekers, ran in the magazine in 1944 and became one of her best-known bodies of work. She also photographed jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald with a notable warmth. Model taught photography at the California School of Fine Arts, New York's New School for Social Research, and the International Center of Photography; her best-known pupil was Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971), who studied under her in 1957 and became a close friend.

Model's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications worldwide, beginning with the National Gallery of Canada's 1990 retrospective. Her photographs are held in many private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, and the Getty Museum, with the largest holding, some 297 works and her personal archive, at the National Gallery of Canada. She died in 1983 in New York City, leaving a body of work that encapsulated modern urban lifestyles and shaped how the next generation looked at the street.