Lisette Model Austrian-American, 1901-1983

Lisette Model (1901–1983) was a leading figure in twentieth-century documentary photography, known for a frank, unsentimental approach to her subjects. She worked candidly, often without being seen, pitiless toward the wealthy French tourists on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, yet unsparing without ever being cruel toward the residents of New York’s Lower East Side. Her frames crop tightly, tilt, and approach their subjects from low angles, bringing the human figure forcefully into the foreground. Her example shaped the next generation of American photography, above all through her teaching.

Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in Vienna to a Jewish father of Italian and Austrian descent and a French Catholic mother, Model was privately tutored and trained as a musician. At nineteen, she began studying with Arnold Schoenberg, whom she later described as the one teacher who had formed her. She moved to Paris in 1924 and, by the early 1930s, had abandoned music. She studied painting with André Lhote and learned the rudiments of photography from her younger sister, Olga. In 1934, she made the photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice that were subsequently published in the French magazine Regards. She married the Russian painter Evsa Model in 1937, and the couple emigrated to New York the following year.

In New York, her work turned to the street: Reflections, made in shop windows along Fifth Avenue; Running Legs, photographed from pavement level; and scenes of the crowds at Coney Island, on the Bowery, and along Delancey Street. Alexey Brodovitch introduced her to Beaumont Newhall, who acquired two prints for The Museum of Modern Art and included her work in Sixty Photographs, the inaugural exhibition of the museum’s photography department, in 1940. The Photo League gave her a solo exhibition in 1941. That same year, she began photographing for Harper’s Bazaar, where Coney Island Bather was her first assignment; she continued contributing to the magazine until 1955. Her membership in the Photo League later brought her under FBI scrutiny and cost her commissions.

Beginning in 1951, Model taught at the New School for Social Research, continuing for more than three decades, alongside private classes in her home. Diane Arbus studied with her in 1957 and drew extensively on her early methods; Rosalind Fox Solomon and Larry Fink were also among her students. Model received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965 and died in New York on March 30, 1983. Aperture published her monograph in 1979.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery represents the Estate of Lisette Model and has presented Self Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model (2011), Songs and the Sky (2016), and We Are the Subject, with Diane Arbus and Rosalind Fox Solomon (2018). Her work is held in the collections of the International Center of Photography, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, which holds her archive, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.