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| Lisette Model Worker, Sylvania Factory ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Washington Restaurant ca. 1943 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Man wearing Tie ca. 1946 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Woman with Veil, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"In 1949, in San Francisco, I photographed a woman sitting on a bench in Union Square, waiting for the trolley. It's one of my better-known pictures, made in America, but not an American picture. It's a picture only a Viennese could make. I'm not kidding."
"I flashed on the old woman and saw fraud with a capital F. In her girlish hairdo – a wig?, in her eyebrows, drawn with a palsied hand, in the smeared lipstick. Under her veil was the twisted face of a weasel, though weasels in their natural habitat are far more beautiful. Animals in the zoo are more honest – the ugliest are what they are. Her glance was a predator's. Ferocious, yet fearful and pathetic. This wasn't a person. It was a beast with weasel's jaws and teeth that could sink into your flesh and never let go. I snapped the shutter while she turned, as if startled by a sound only animals can hear."
"Who would this weasel-woman have been without the veil, furs, rings, lace, and false flowers? Who had she been during her life that made her need to mask what she had become? The light, something I took years to understand, was my agile assistant. It stripped away the frippery to reveal a desiccated, terrifying skeleton, a wasted soul, deluded by a self that no longer existed."
"God! I loved these kinds of people when I found them! I found quite a few because I was trained from birth to recognize them. I didn't want to know this woman any better than I'd want to get inside the head of Lady Havisham in Dickens's Great Expectations. Havisham was a tragic old bird, devoured by time and a passion for revenge. Disappointment and disillusionment made her cruel. She imprinted this cruelty on her niece."
"Back to my point. I was tremendously attracted, but the San Francisco woman didn't arouse my sympathy. I wasn't a concerned photographer, to use the American expression. Darling, I had no desire to make a picture that would rescue her or anyone. I didn't want to change the situation or urge others to do so. I didn't try to ennoble her, like those bleeding hearts, working for the Farm Security Administration, tried to do when they photographed the American rural poor and dispossessed. The woman was a ruin, a cesspool of desperate, feigned elegance. I couldn't defend her, any more than I'd join a society for the preservation of sewer rats."
"What impresses you is what presses the button! That's what I used to tell my students. I hooked her like a fisherman hooks a trout. In another shot, further down on that San Francisco bench, I hooked her fellow traveler. Animal demons. Modern gargoyles. Freaks. These women didn't think they were freaks. They imagined they were beautiful, artful products of their wardrobes and make-up tables. I saw pawn-shop aristocrats."
"I saw what my student Diane Arbus, in her own work, called the flaw. What interested me wasn't only the flaw. It was perversion, entire pathologies, deeply buried survival strategies that indelibly mark a person. I exposed them in a split-second. To identify these animal-women as human, I suppose there had to be that crack, that access, a way to distinguish the fraud from the real, so we could recognize some version of ourselves."
"It's even more complicated. Viewing these women, you keep shifting between being repelled, recognizing the tragedy of self-deception – like a punch in the stomach! – and wanting to laugh out loud. You're seeing double. You're seeing triple. It's like hearing more than one voice or melody in music. Maybe that's the idea Diane got from me, the simultaneous layers: what we see, what the subject wants us to see, and the gestures and grimaces it uses to persuade us of its own truth. Some modern Austrian writer said, The terrible is always ridiculous. It's what I've always felt, and vice-versa. I saw it in Diane's work too."
"I don't remember showing these pictures to Diane. She might have seen the weasel-woman published or exhibited somewhere. I never printed the other negative. No one's made anything of this, but behind the horrific, the terrible in Diane's work, is a European consciousness of the double take, the triple take. Fraud stripped bare. Like me, she saw that we're born unfair and depraved. There was nothing like this in American photography to influence her . . . "
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| Lisette Model Woman on Ferry ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model James Mason, International Refugee Organization Auction, New York 1948 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Fanny Bloodgood 1947 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"Photography was grey blurs in the newspaper. In Vienna, that's what we thought. Photography was ghastly, framed pictures on the mantelpiece. You and your relatives bewildered, frozen, then water colored to vivify their corpses. Photography was a bore. And photographers? No more important than the janitor. Or the person who repaired your automobile."
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| Lisette Model Edward Weston, San Francisco 1946 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Anastasia, Queen of the Gypsies ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Lighthouse Blind Workshop 1944 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Anton Refrigier, New York ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model The Right to Beauty 1944 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Pannonica de Koenigswarter (1913-1988) ca. 1956 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Evsa Model, New York ca. 1950 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"I taught to survive. Teaching was also an excuse. It took so much effort it was impossible for me to do anything else. I longed to go out and calmly make pictures, as I'd done before. I never blamed my life with Evsa for this. He was so unusual, so important to me. He understood my photographs better than anyone else. But secretly, I realized that marriage can take a terrible toll on an artist."
– quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)