Lisette Model: photography from the guts

(Lisette Model, Running Legs, NYC, 42nd Street, 1940 - 1941)

Photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983) has been somewhat overshadowed by her famous students Diane Arbus, Bruce Weber, and Larry Fink. But she was and still is a role model, both as a teacher and a photographer. Her pupil Diane Arbus’s photos reveal clear traces of Model’s influence.

Model was a pioneer of street photography. In 1934, she made her first photoreport on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. They are remorseless photographs of the bourgeoisie, unique for their period. Model saw through the world of glitter and glamour and photographed people as they were: marked and drawn by life. She had a keen eye for the bizarre without ever becoming voyeuristic. At that time, her name was still Lisette Seybert. She was born in Vienna to a relatively affluent family. As a young girl, music was her great passion, and she studied with the renowned Schönberg. After her father’s death, the family moved to France, where Model dreamed of becoming a singer. At one point, however, she suddenly abandoned music and acquired a camera. She learned to take pictures from Rogi André, André Kertész’s first wife. “Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in,” André told her. Model never strayed from this maxim, and later passed it on to her own students. In that same year, 1934, she met her husband, Evsa Model, a painter of Russian origin. Three years later, they were married, and in 1938 they emigrated to New York. The city had an enormous impact on Lisette Model’s work.

(Lisette Model, Woman with veil, San Fransisco, 1949)

In the series “Reflections”, she focuses on display windows and the reflections of skyscrapers and random passers-by. “Running Legs” evokes the hurry in which men and women move through street scenes. But in addition to the weather-beaten faces of beggars and the faded beauty of rich ladies, Model also photographed the joy and vivacity of jazz clubs. That joie de vivre also radiates from what is probably her most famous photograph. A corpulent sunbather poses in her black bathing-suit on Coney Island, without a hint of camera shyness. Proud of her curves. Model regularly published in Look and Harper’s Bazaar, but by the 1950s her commissions were on the decline. Her photos were considered too hard and too distressing for a period of unbridled positivism. So Model devoted herself completely to teaching. “Photograph from your guts,” she told her students. She taught her last class a few weeks before her death, at the age of 82.
With 40 original prints, Keitelman is paying homage to a photographer who is, without any doubt, one of the key figures in the history of photography.

Lisette Model: Resonance > 2/3, di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 12 > 18.00, KEITELMAN GALLERY, rue Van Eyckstraat 44, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-511.35.80, www.keitelmangallery.com