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| Lisette Model Lower East Side, New York ca. 1939-45 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Lower East Side, New York ca. 1939-42 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Circus, New York 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Circus, New York 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Circus, New York 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"I practically memorized Pascal's Pensées. From an early age I identified with his profound helplessness: I do not know who put me into the world, he wrote, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself better than it knows anything else. – Pascal mirrored doubts that never left me."
"We're floating in a medium of vast extent, Pascal says, drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro. We think we've found a fixed point to cling to, but it shifts. Leaves us behind. We follow it. It eludes our grasp. Flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still. This is our natural state. Yet it's the state most contrary to our desire to find firm footing, a lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity. But our whole foundation cracks. The earth opens up into the depth of the abyss."
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| Lisette Model Belmont Park, New York 1956 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Italy 1953 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model House Facade, Trento 1953 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Reno 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Reno 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Reno 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Street at night, Reno 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Venezuela 1954 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"If you don't properly prepare for death, you have to accept the consequences. I died 30 March 1983 in the New York Hospital. I was weak with all kinds of illnesses. Back, teeth, legs, arms, severe shortness of breath. – Forty years of living in a basement apartment with a chain smoker doesn't improve your lungs, darling. As soon as the spirit left my body . . . well, it remained a spirit."
"Incinerated, I remained at the crematorium quite a while. I don't know if the people there knew I was famous, or not. One day my attorney Joseph Blum saw a newspaper announcement for my memorial service at The New School, and Ben Fernandez's name as head of the photography department. Blum's associate Richard Blakeman wrote to Ben saying someone'd better come get me. Ben happens to live in North Bergen where the crematorium is. That peculiar coincidence, darling, should be given no special meaning whatsoever. My ashes came to his house."
"I've always been superstitious. If something comes to you in a certain way, you don't refuse it. So is Ben. He got my ashes in the mail and kept them for himself. They're not in an urn. They're in the same pressed flake-board box the crematorium sent. He won't alter a thing. He's afraid his luck might change."
"You see, from the moment I arrived in that box, everything in Ben's life started happening in a very positive way. That's what he tells people, darling. He got contracts he didn't think he'd get. A job photographing Nixon's lawyer. All kinds of things that could have gone wrong started to go right."
– quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)