Lisette Model
14
Works
Artist Spotlight
Lisette Model: The City Laid Bare
There is a photograph that stops you cold. A heavyset woman sits on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, her body spilling magnificently across a beach chair, her gaze confronting the camera with absolute indifference to your judgment. Made in the early 1940s, this image from Lisette Model's celebrated Promenade des Anglais series has become one of the most electrifying portraits in the history of photography. It announces, without apology, an artist who saw the world with surgical clarity and radical compassion in equal measure. Lisette Model was born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in Vienna in… Continue reading
Artists in conversation
Weegee
Weegee shared Model's gritty, unflinching approach to urban street photography, capturing raw human subjects with psychological intensity and a bold sense of social reality in mid-twentieth century New York.
Diane Arbus
Arbus pursued similarly confrontational and psychologically penetrating portrait photography focused on marginal or unconventional subjects, sharing Model's commitment to exposing the inner life of her sitters without sentimentality.
Helen Levitt
Levitt worked in black and white street photography in New York with a humanistic eye for spontaneous human behavior in working class urban environments, closely paralleling Model's documentary sensibility and social empathy.
Artists who inspired them
Berenice Abbott
Abbott introduced Model to photography in Paris and served as a direct mentor, instilling in her a rigorous documentary approach and a commitment to the camera as a tool for honest social observation.
André Kertész
Kertész pioneered the expressive use of candid street photography in Paris during the period when Model was developing her own practice, demonstrating how formal composition could serve deeply humanistic and psychological ends.