Sunday, January 7, 2018

Running Legs and Reflections - Lisette Model

Lisette Model
Running Legs, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"In New York, my ear was delicately tuned to the mixture of street noises.  When I photographed running legs and feet, I heard their music first.  It's not surprising that the patterns of legs, feet and shadows look something like musical scores.  They're dissonant too, incomplete, unresolved.  I don't think I was consciously aware of musical rhythms, counterpoint, harmony, dissonance as I made these pictures.  I knew something was going on.  That's why I went to lectures by psychiatrists and collected their articles on unconscious motivation.  If my pictures of running feet look like no one else's, it's because photographing, I wasn't documenting them.  They were visualizations of what I heard."

Lisette Model
Running Legs, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, Fifth Avenue, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, Forty-second Street, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Running Legs, Forty-second Street, New York
ca. 1940-41
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Reflections, New York
ca. 1940-45
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

"Try to think of my store-window reflections musically, too, darling.  I loved the ambiguity of space, which became rich orchestrations, multiple overlapping, themes that didn't resolve.  Quavering measures, confused rhythms, innumerable nuances, as in a dream.  Berenice showed me Atget's photographs of store windows.  I never wanted to see what others had done.  Not even the great Atget.  I was afraid of paralysis!  My reflections weren't surrealistic like his.  John Cage liked to criticize certain musical compositions saying, There is too much there there.  There is not enough of nothing in it.  I felt that way about Atget's reflections.  There's just the right amount of nothing in mine." 

Lisette Model
Reflections, Rockefeller Center, New York
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Window, San Francisco
1949
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Window, San Francisco
1949
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Reflections, New York
ca. 1950
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

Lisette Model
Reflections, New York
ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada

 quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)