(November 10, 1901 – March 30, 1983) Photographer
Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her father was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptised into her mother’s faith.
She was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in three languages. At age 19, she began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. “If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg,” she said.
Model left Vienna for Paris after her father’s death in 1924 to study voice with Polish soprano Marya Freund. It was during this period that she met her future husband, the French-Jewish painter Evsa Model (1901-1976). In 1933, she gave up music and recommitted herself to studying visual art, at first taking up painting as a student of Andre Lhote (whose other students included Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene). She also took up photography, taking basic instruction in darkroom techniques from her younger sister Olga Seybert (herself a lifelong professional photographer), although Parisian portrait photographer Rogi Andre was the person Model credited with providing her primary instruction in camera techniques.
Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 (she and Olga had emigrated from Vienna several years prior), Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which are among her most widely reproduced and exhibited images. These close-cropped, often clandestine portraits of the local privileged class already bore what would become her signature style: close-up, unsentimental and unretouched expositions of vanity, insecurity and loneliness.
She married Evsa Model in 1937 and the following year they emigrated to join her husband’s sister in Manhattan. She worked as a photographer for PM magazine and regularly published in Harper’s Bazaar by editors Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch. Model eventually became a member of the New York Photo League and studied with Sid Grossman until their demise in 1951. Model was an active League member and served as a judge in membership print competitions. In 1941, the League hosted her first solo exhibition. From 1941-1953, she was a freelance photographer and contributed to many publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Look, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
In 1947, she taught photography at the San Francisco Institute of Fine Arts. In 1951, Model was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend Berenice Abbott was also teaching photography. Model’s best known pupil was Diane Arbus, who studied under her in 1957, and Arbus owed much of her early technique to Model’s example. Model taught in New York until she died.
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