LisetteModel

Lisette Model (born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern; 1901, Vienna – 1983, New York) was an Austrian-born American photographer known for the frank, unsentimental humanism of her street photography. Raised in a bourgeois Viennese household, she studied music with the composer Arnold Schoenberg before turning, in the early 1930s, to visual art and eventually photography, largely self-taught with early guidance from her sister Olga and from the photographer Rogi André, who advised her to “never photograph anything you are not passionately interested in.”

In 1934, on a visit to Nice, Model made a series of close-cropped, often clandestine portraits of wealthy sunbathers on the Promenade des Anglais, published the following year in the magazine Regards. These images already display her signature approach: unflinching, tightly cropped views that strip away context to focus on vanity, insecurity, and human presence. In 1938 she emigrated with her husband, the painter Evsa Model, to New York, where she quickly became part of the city's photographic and publishing world, working for Harper's Bazaar from 1941 to 1955 and producing celebrated series such as Reflections, Running Legs, and her images of Coney Island bathers.

Model was a prominent member of the New York Photo League and, from 1951 until her death, taught at the New School for Social Research, where her students included Diane Arbus, with whom she developed a close professional relationship. In 1976, having met Gerd Sander the previous year, she was the subject of the inaugural solo exhibition at the Sander Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Her photographs were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, and are held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery. Model remained active in New York until her death in 1983.