Famous Austrians VII: Lisette Model

San Francisco, Lisette Model, 1949

Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in Vienna in 1901, Lisette Model is one of the most iconic women photographers of the 20th century. She moved from Vienna to Nice as a young girl, and then to Paris to study music in 1926. She later switched her focus to painting and photography and moved to New York with her husband in 1938. To earn a living at first, she worked as a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar. In the 1950s, she taught photography at the New School in New York. Among her pupils was a young Diane Arbus.

Coney Island, New York, 1941, Lisette Model

Her work is evocative of a need for questioning human motives, society, and in many cases the lives of those on the social fringe in the 1940's and 1950's when Model was at the height of her fecundity. Divorcees, the obese, old people were all considered viable, and worthy, photographic subjects - which can be seen taken to an even further extreme in Arbus' works. Her street scenes and night life photographs are also famous and enduring. The human form, in all its intricacies: beauty, reality of form and figure, necessity of limbs and movement, at once familiarity and strangeness.

Reflections, New York, 1939, Lisette Model

Model died in 1983, but her work lives on. A particularly good  permanent exhibit of her work is at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.  There are also pieces at the MoMA in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.