The midcentury road photographer who documented New Yorkers in all their uncooked, grotesque humanity

Lisette Model, born into an upper-class Jewish-Catholic household in Vienna in 1901, didn’t got down to be a photographer.

As a younger lady she moved to Paris and studied music with Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Through Schoenberg, she was launched to the rising model of German Expressionism, by which painters used aggressive brushstrokes and exaggerated types to focus on the psychological turmoil of recent life.

After abandoning a music profession, Model thought she would turn out to be a darkroom technician—then realized taking images was extra to her liking. She borrowed a 35 millimeter digicam from her sister and got down to doc women and men lounging on the seashore in Nice.

“The nascent photographer lifted the camera to her eye and captured them in a series of images that draw out the awkwardness of their well-fed, well-dressed bodies and the fascination of faces modeled by age, which appear almost grotesque, but also striking, even sculptural,” states Artsy.

After marrying Russian-born painter Evsa Model in 1937 and immigrating with him to New York one 12 months later amid rising antisemitism in Europe, she dedicated herself to a profession as a visible artist.

Model revealed images in magazines like PM and Harper’s Bazaar, and she or he grew to become a part of town’s postwar images neighborhood. The couple’s first Gotham house was within the Master Apartments on Riverside Drive.

Drawing on the affect of German Expressionism, she pioneered a special type of road images, counting on tilted angles and close-ups to reveal the uncooked, unposed, and unbeautiful sides of her topics and replicate their inside feelings moderately than town exterior.

One of Model’s earliest images, taken within the Forties for Harper’s Bazaar, introduced her to Coney Island (second photograph). “There she found a corpulent woman in a black bathing suit and with a beaming expression that radiated confidence and joyfulness,” states Artsy.

“Model captured this woman—who would become immortalized in her photographs as the Coney Island bather—standing in a high crouch and lying on her side with her head propped up on one arm.”

Jazz golf equipment and the Lower East Side grew to become common haunts for Model. There she discovered her topics in unguarded moments, displaying their imperfect humanity in opposition to an unsentimental (and infrequently close-cropped) stage or streetscape.

Unsparing portraits weren’t her solely focus. Model gave the impression to be captivated by road lifetime of New York City, its vitality and thriller. She produced a collection of images that reveal town’s many layers in shadows and glass reflections.

“Then, as now, the storefront served as mirror and stage, showcasing a performative play of products and pedestrians,” wrote MOMA underneath a 1939 photograph exhibited within the museum: “Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York.” (fourth photograph)

In 1951, Model started educating images at The New School. Among her college students was Diane Arbus, who she remained near till Arbus’ suicide at Westbeth in Greenwich Village in 1971.

“There are obvious reasons for seeing similarities in their work: both focus on portraiture, both have chosen ‘extreme’ types of people as sitters, and both create renderings of people that are perceived by critics as ‘grotesque,’” wrote Shelley Rice in Artforum.

Model continued educating and taking images by the Nineteen Seventies. In 1982, she died of coronary heart failure. Intensely personal, she appeared to present few formal interviews or publicly share ideas about her craft.

She apparently did go away one easy piece of recommendation: “Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in” is a quote usually attributed to her.

[Top photo, “Little Man, Lower East Side,” National Gallery of Art; second photo, “Coney Island,” MOMA; third photo: “Lower East Side,” Sotheby’s; fourth photo: “Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York,” National Gallery of Art; fifth photo, “Lower East Side,” MOMA; sixth photo: “Window Reflections,” MOMA; seventh photo: “Sammy’s, New York,” Whitney Museum of Art]

Tags: Forties New York City Street Photography, How Lisette Model Changed Street Photography, Lisette Model Diane Arbus, Lisette Model Midcentury Street Photographer, Lisette Model New York City Photos, Lisette Model Photos

This entry was posted on May 25, 2026 at 2:06 am and is filed underneath artwork, Lower East Side. You can comply with any responses to this entry by the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your personal web site.