Lisette Model's Fearless Eye

If Lisette Model took up photography as a way of earning a living, it is also true that she always fought for her own subjects, rather than simply carry out the assignments given by editors. She believed that for a photograph to be successful its subject had to be something that “hits you in the stomach.” This could be something familiar or something unfamiliar.

Model thought of the camera as a detection device, something that makes it possible to see what habit often hides. Concentrating on the frantic, compelling tempo of urban life, she was fascinated by people in the street and the clientele in nightclubs. As a photographer she followedher instincts, then cropped her negatives in the laboratory to eliminate any superflous details and thus obtain her direct, powerful and richly human images.

Her work evinces empathy, curiosity, compassion and admiration, and reflects the photographer’s attraction to voluminous forms, energy and liveliness, to emphatic gesture and expression: the world as stage.

Promenade des Anglais, Nice, 1934

Coney Island Bather, New York
c. 1939-July 1941

Reflection, New York
c. 1939-1945

Running Legs, Forty-second Street, New York
c. 1940-1941

Running Legs, Fifth Avenue, New York
c. 1940-1941

Lower East Side, New York
c. 1939-1945

San Francisco, 1949

Woman with Veil, San Francisco, 1949

Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York
c. 1945

Officers' Club
c. 1944

Gallagher's, New York, 1945

Nick's, New York
c. 1940-August 1944

Café Metropole, New York
c. 1946

Sammy's, New York
c. 1940-1944

Opera, San Francisco, 1949