Photographs by Lisette Model: Jazz Legends

“I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,” the photographer Lisette Model as soon as stated. America is many issues—pleasure and ache, freedom and repression—and Model’s photographs of jazz musicians and their audiences captured the complete vary. Model, a Viennese Jewish émigré, is greatest identified right this moment for her avenue pictures, however within the early Fifties, she got down to create a e-book of jazz footage, with an accompanying essay to be written by Langston Hughes. But because the artwork historian Audrey Sands writes in an essay included in a new book of Model’s photos, suspicion of her leftist politics led to the undertaking’s collapse; Model herself was investigated by the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy. When she died in 1983, Model left behind some 1,800 negatives from her jazz undertaking, most of which have been by no means printed.

Model cherished to doc audiences in moments of rapture. What jumps out in her photos of musicians, nonetheless, is the wariness of their eyes and gestures—even from the courtly Duke Ellington. “I know of no photographer who has photographed people as inwardly as Lisette Model,” the photographer Berenice Abbott wrote. Perhaps shared experiences of persecution related Model, who had fled the Nazis in Europe, together with her topics. Even because the U.S. authorities used jazz to advertise America’s picture overseas, the style’s luminaries suffered racism and violence at dwelling. Miles Davis was brutally overwhelmed by a police officer throughout a break in one among his personal reveals at a Manhattan nightclub, the worst of many incidents with legislation enforcement all through his profession. The drummer Art Taylor finally relocated to France, the place he and lots of different Black musicians sought higher circumstances. Billie Holiday, who for years had been harassed by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was arrested as she lay dying of liver and coronary heart illness within the hospital. Model took a collection of poignant postmortem pictures of Holiday, then by no means shot one other jazz picture once more.

Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures

By Lisette Model

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*Photographs of Davis, Ellington, Nance, and Taylor: © Lisette Model Foundation, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation / Lisette Model fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives

Photograph of Holiday: © Lisette Model Foundation, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation / The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

This article seems within the October 2025 print version with the headline “Jazz Legends.”