Lisette Model

Lisette Model photographed people at close range without flattering them, and taught Diane Arbus to photograph what she was afraid of. She was born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern into a wealthy Viennese family, studied music with Arnold Schoenberg, and came to photography late and almost by accident in Paris in the 1930s. The series that made her name was Promenade des Anglais, made in Nice in 1934: the rich sunning themselves on the seafront, shot from close up with a wide lens and heavily cropped, unsparing about flesh and complacency. She emigrated to New York in 1938, and her work appeared in Harper's Bazaar under Alexey Brodovitch - reflections in shop windows, singers in Lower East Side dives, blind people, feet on Fifth Avenue. She photographed relatively little after the 1950s and taught instead, at the New School for nearly thirty years, where her students included Arbus, Larry Fink and Rosalind Fox Solomon. Her teaching is remembered in phrases her students wrote down: shoot from the gut, never photograph anything you are not passionately interested in. She was investigated during the McCarthy period for suspected communist ties and lost magazine work over it. Her reputation was mostly recovered after a 1979 retrospective in New York. She and Arbus remained close until Arbus died, and Model spoke about her rarely afterwards. Her negatives went to the National Gallery of Canada. She was still teaching the year she died at eighty-two. She had trained as a pianist and singer before ever holding a camera, and said the switch was because she needed to earn a living.

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