Lisette Model's life and work is difficult to bring into any kind of focus. She gave differing, sometimes contradictory, accounts of significant episodes. She also actively opposed and frustrated attempts to develop a coherent biographical treatment.
Model continued photographing and teaching up until her death in 1983. Her reputation as a photographer rests mainly on photographs taken in mid-century, before and after her emigration to America. She was a gifted and dedicated teacher, best known for having mentored Diane Arbus.
The similarities and differences in the lives and work of Model and Arbus are intriguing. More about that at the end of this page. But let's anticipate that up by describing the impact Model had on first meeting her most famous student.
Model took up teaching in 1949 through the intermediary of Ansel Adams. She continued to photograph and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1951 until her death in 1983.
In the early 1940s, Arbus had attended classes with Berenice Abbott and she and her husband, Allan had visited the gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz. Together they worked as fashion photographers, initially for Diane Arbus's department store, but also for Vogue and similar magazines. But Diane was increasingly subject to depressions and eventually simply refused to continue the fashion work.
When Arbus joined Model's class she was visibly fragile... in tears. According to her husband, Allan, after three classes she had found herself as a photographer.
The close relationship which developed between student and mentor was based on parallels and affinities in their life and in their work. These will be explored towards the end of this page.
Model was born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in Vienna, in 1901, to well-to-do Jewish parents. Her education came through a succession of private tutors. Model's parents were good friends with a number of the leading musicians and composers of the age. Her childhood association with them led to her studying music and composition with Arnold Schönberg. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg", she later maintained.
In 1926 She moved to Paris to study singing but her studies came to an abrupt halt in 1933 when she developed difficulties with her voice.
Instead she committed herself to studying visual art, at first taking up painting as a student of André Lhote (whose other students included Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene). Already familiar with the work of German and Austrian Expressionists, in Paris she mixed in artistic circles and married the Russian-born Constructivist painter, Evsa Model (1901 - 1976).
From 1926 to 1933 she underwent psychoanalysis for childhood trauma. Her brother later claimed that she had been sexually assaulted by her father.
It was her younger sister, Olga, who taught her how to use a darkroom, and André Kertész's first wife, Rogi André who showed her how to use a Rolleiflex twin-lens camera but her decision to become a professional photographer came from a conversation in late 1933 or early 1934 with a fellow Viennese émigré and former student of Schönberg, Hanns Eisler (who had fled Germany once Hitler came into power). He warned her about the need to survive during a time of high political tension, explaining that she might later need to earn a living by photography.
Lisette’s husband, Evsa opened a constructivist gallery/bookshop (at 75 Boulevard du Montparnasse). The next door neighbours were André Kertész and his first wife, Rogi André (Rosa Klein). Rogi (a male alias) had also taught herself photography . When Rogi divorced André Kertész she joined in partnership with two other photographers, Florence Henri and Ilse Bing. She passed onto Lisette Model the advice her husband had given her: “Never photograph something you for which you have little enthusiasm, but only what interests you passionately”, a quote she would later rework and become well-known for in her teaching career: "Shoot from the gut"
Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934, Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits – published in 1935 in Regards, the magazine of the French Communist Party.
In 1938 Model and her husband, Evsa emigrated to the USA. Model later claimed that she did not take any photographs in the first 18 months in New York but an article dated 1939 seems to indicate that she was taking photos and adjusting to the new environment.
The question she confronted was ... how to capture the modernity of the American city, the first vertical city, viewed by Europeans as a “new world”? While others, such as her contemporary, Berenice Abbott, privileged skyscrapers, Lisette Model walked the streets and focused on the passersby. Her style adapted to the specific moods of the New York streets to best capture the bustling crowds and the city’s effervescence.
"Mirrors And Glass", Blind Magazine, Maria Foka, 6 January 2020
Needing to earn a living, Model applied for a job in the darkroom of the magazine PM's Weekly. The editor, Ralph Steiner, was already familiar with the series of photos taken in Nice and previously published in Regards. Model remembered the introductory conversation as follows: "Steiner asked, 'What is it that you wanted?' I said, 'The darkroom job.' He said, 'You must be crazy. You are one of the greatest photographers in the world!' And I said to myself, 'These Americans -- they are insane! Here is a person who, after one year of fiddling around with a camera a little bit, is the greatest photographer in the world. You try that on the piano or violin!' Then Brodovitch brought the photographs to the Museum of Modern Art, and they exhibited some of them. I thought they were insane. Since when does a photograph belong in a museum.'
Model was among the group of photographers included in “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Aesthetics”, the 1940 inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography. Within a very short time she was known and accepted among the US photographic community.
Model joined other photographers and other artists at the jazz joints on the Lower East Side and the Bowery, especially in a small bistro called Sammy's Bar on the Bowery, also photographed by Weegee (Arthur Fellig).
In 1941 Model's photos taken years before in Nice were published by Ralph Steiner in PM's Weekly under the rather tendetious headline... "Why France Fell".
Model eventually became a prominent member of the New York Photo League and studied with Sid Grossman. Despite the League's effort to maintain that it was a cultural, photographic organization, political pressure led to the League's demise in 1951. Model's involvement with the New York Photo League became the cause of much strife for her during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when the organization came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The FBI interviewed Model personally in 1954 and attempted to recruit her as an informant. She refused to cooperate which led to her being placed on their 'watchlist' and to increased difficulty in finding opportunities to work, leading to her shifting her focus towards teaching.
Through the advocacy of Ansel Adams she got to teach at the San Francisco Institute of Fine Arts in 1949 and then, in 1951, she was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend, Berenice Abbott was already teaching. Apart from Diane Arbus, Model’s students included Larry Fink, Helen Gee, John Gossage, Charles Pratt, Eva Rubinstein and Rosalind Solomon.
Model referred repeatedly to the artistic efforts of children and urged students to photograph 'from the gut'. But she was also meticulous: she left 38 teaching notebooks, which include her detailed study, for example, of Goethe's Theory of Colour.
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Her series “Running Legs” (1940–1941) is made up of closeups of legs and feet. It captures both the streets teeming with crowds and the mad rush of the pedestrians. At the same time, Lisette Model was interested in storefront reflections and shadows. Here, she produced even more complex images, with entanglements and superimpositions of silhouettes and buildings, where it is difficult to tell apart reality and illusion. She thus opens a door to abstraction and stimulates the viewer’s imagination.
"Lisette Model: A Photography Lesson", 27 September 2021, by Sophie Bernard
This series along with her work Running Legs attracted the attention of editors Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch from Harper's Bazaar, a magazine she went on to work for from 1941 through to 1955. (One of her first assignments was to photograph Coney Island, where she took /some of her most recognized works such as "Coney Island Bather".)
Edward Steichen, the director of MoMA, said of her work:
Lisette Model is one of the foremost photographers of our time. Her prints record a relentless probing and searching into realities among people, their foibles, senselessness, sufferings, and on occasion their greatness. The resulting pictures are often camera equivalents of bitter tongue-lashings. She strikes swift, hard and sharp, then comes to a dead stop, for her work is devoid of all extraneous devices or exaggerations. (www.photo-seminars.com)
Although appreciated by fellow photographers and the editors and art editors of important magazines, Model was never at home in the world of fashion. She disapproved strongly of The Family of Man exhibition (1955), which she saw as over-sentimental and she had little sympathy for the interest shown by various galleries in 'creative photography'.
'Music, poetry are supposed to be creative or they are nothing. The very use of the term 'creative' when applied to photography is therefore discriminatory, implying a difference that does not exist.'
Model's travels (to Italy, or Venezuela, for example) were well-photographed. And she was able to continue having photos published. But her fame rested on three series (Nice, the running legs and the reflections). There were subjects that interested her throughout her life, including dogs and the aged, especially old ladies.
In the 1970s, Model developed rheumatism in her hands, but continued diligently to teach and to photograph. A lack of resources meant that many of her negatives went unprinted. After her husband had a heart attack in 1975 she gave him constant care for over a year until his death.
Then in 1979 the first book of Model's photographs was published by Aperture and included a preface by Berenice Abbott. Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus's sometime lover, designed the book.
The tendency to make heroes of individuals is manifested quite literally in Model’s portrait work: anyone frozen by this artist’s camera, be they vagrant bum or rich matron, is automatically perceived as being larger-than-life. Most of Model’s images are printed in 16 by 20 inch size, and the striking impact of the reproductions in her newly-published monograph, Lisette Model, explains why the artist was unwilling to exhibit her work in book form until a publisher agreed to print the images in an appropriately large scale. In many ways, Model’s images are about scale, since she consistently photographs her subjects at close range and from an extremely low vantage point. Seen in this way, “real” people are metamorphosized into looming beings of massive—heroic—proportions and volume. The artist often emphasizes this effect by indulging her predilection for obese subjects, whose enormous bodies displace an inordinate amount of space within the picture plane. And the close proximity of these Amazonian creatures to the camera, which seems literally to have invaded their personal space, makes them appear simultaneously awesome, ominous and almost grotesque.
Within this context, Model’s “extreme” (her words) sitters—who are most often either excessively fat or skinny, either extremely rich or poor—take on the air of character actors whose attributes are exaggerated into theatrical displays.
IN HER INTRODUCTION TO the monograph entitled Diane Arbus, the artist stated: “I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought, There are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it. It’ll be like what they used to call the common man or something. It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.”
Like Model, Arbus was born into a very wealthy family. Both suffered abuse within the family, the details of which are not clear. The pre-war photos from Nice with which Model had achieved a level of fame were anything but flattering, and bear comparison to the challenging photos which became Arbus's trade-mark.
In her own teaching, Arbus agreed with the notions of Abbott and Model: that what matters is what a photo is ABOUT, rather than what it is in itself … and that COMPOSITION is the way in which meaning is discovered or imparted in what is depicted.
Model was perfectly placed to unlock Arbus's talent. She was devasted when Arbus committed suicide in 1972. Arthur Lubow, author of a biography of Arbus, described their initial encounters thus:
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The Woman Who Influenced Diane Arbus’s Eye: Arthur Lubow, WallStreetJournal, May 25, 2016
WHEN DIANE ARBUS, despondent and fragile-seeming, arrived at Lisette Model’s class in Greenwich Village in 1956, she had recently exited a decade-long partnership with her husband in fashion photography. It was an enterprise she loathed. Generating concepts and styling the models before Allan Arbus clicked the shutter, she felt she was being paid not to reveal the truth but to conceal it. Over the next decade and a half, practicing on her own, Diane would produce photographs that uncovered relationships, pretenses, dreams and delusions—secrets that were invisible to the ordinary eye. These images established her as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century.
But once she’d formally renounced her participation in the Diane & Allan Arbus Studio, she felt lost. “She looked like she was either just before or just after a nervous breakdown,” Model recounted to Phillip Lopate in the late ’70s, in an unpublished essay. “The things I said would make her start to cry. She would burst into tears, she said she was so moved by them.” The photographs Arbus brought to show her new teacher were wispy and frail: dead leaves, discarded newspapers, flyaway balloons. The 33-year-old Arbus was alternating between manic euphoria and debilitating despair. “I’ve been a balloon for months so that when I was strong I was so light I almost floated away and a blue balloon is like one of Pooh’s so no one could tell me from the sky,” she wrote to a friend in 1958, “and when I was weak all the air sputtered and fizzled and fluttered out of me.”
As a mature photographer, Arbus developed strategies to make a photograph yield more than it is naturally equipped to deliver. She photographed freaks, nudists, female impersonators and mentally disabled adults, spending weeks, sometimes years, getting to know her subjects so well that they would drop their guard in her presence. If time was limited, she learned to surprise people into candour, or exhaust them into it. It wasn’t just truth she was after, but Truth. She could be devious in her efforts to produce a photograph she considered honest. “I love secrets, and I can find out anything,” she told a Newsweek reporter in 1967.
The departure [of her husband], though painful, gave her latitude. “I always felt that it was our separation that made her a photographer,” Allan told me in 2003. She was free to visit people and places that would have horrified him if they were living together. Along with the independence that Diane gained when he moved out, Allan credited Lisette for her artistic growth. He described it as an overnight transfiguration. “That was Lisette,” he said. “Three sessions and Diane was a photographer.”
Credits:
Photos from the internet under 'fair use' criteria. Soley for educational purposes.