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| Lisette Model Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York ca. 1940-46 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York ca. 1940-46 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"Take the society women eating. In Vienna, I saw millions of miserable, high-class people eating this way. The New Yorkers were all dressed up. Loaded with jewelry. To their smug selves, they were complete. To me they were more miserable than the poor on the streets of Paris or the Lower East Side. Why did I wait till the mouth of one was wide-open before I pressed the shutter? Not to bring her down. Not to show how ugly she could be with her tongue sticking out. Eating, the smug socialite became something else. Authentic! Hungry. Full of desire. Her grasping tongue exploded the facade. I froze the discordance. Emancipated it, as Schönberg would say. It was another side of her. A new feeling. Incomplete. Unresolved."
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| Lisette Model International Refugee Organization Auction, New York 1948 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Gallagher's, New York 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Murray Hill Hotel, New York ca. 1940-47 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 Restaurant, New York ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"By 1940 or so I was a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar. On assignment, you're a race horse. The bell rings – you're off and running! Straining. To see what's there. Because there's always something, even when you don't know what the hell you're doing. Later, teaching was the same thing. Ansel Adams pushed me into teaching in San Francisco. In 1949, I was teaching Minor White's course, without any preparation! I'd never taught before. I detest being pushed. You don't change your character overnight!"
"Steiner, Brodovitch, Steichen, and that lot assumed from what they saw as authority, in my pictures, that I was in complete control. It was false. I was a fraud. I couldn't explain this to ignorant boors. Even wonderful writers, like Elizabeth McCausland, and devoted photographers, who loved my work from the beginning, who saw its uniqueness and violent strength, to whom I shall be forever grateful, were mostly ignorant of the world culture that created me. They only knew their own. The Great American Rat-Race!"
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| Lisette Model Fritzie Scheff ca. 1948-49 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Valeska Gert - 'Olé' 1940 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Valeska Gert - 'Olé' 1940 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"Not to sound overly analytical, but the archetype doesn't proceed simply from physical facts. It's the result of how your psyche experiences those facts. Jung said the psyche not only interferes. It becomes autocratic! Flies in the face of the facts to produce the archetype. I isolated my subjects. I printed them large to show that photographed, they became grander, as ideas, than they had been in life. I revealed something mythical and ancient, what Jung called the natural mind, the two-million-year-old being buried in us all. Not everyone wanted to see it."
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| Lisette Model Valeska Gert - 'Death' 1940 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Albert-Alberta, Hubert's Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Cafe Zanzibar, New York ca. 1945 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"They recorded what I said. I let them! I lied about my age, muddled the details of my education and how I got into photography. God knows, what else. Later, those Americans (I call them Americans – there were others), those children figured it out. Some of what I said was true, but I'd told my story so many times I couldn't remember what was real and what I'd invented in the panic of the moment. When I saw the stuff some of them wrote, I was in shock! They said it was what I told them. How could anyone speak or write about me when they kept getting it wrong?"
"I sound like a mad woman. A paranoid. Wouldn't you? Their questions made me too aware of a thousand certainties I never possessed: sound visual training, perseverance, hard work in the dark room, thousands of great, technically perfect photographs spanning a lifetime. That's what Americans admire. Of the 25,000 negatives I shot (another fact I concealed), the few hundred picture I call good are a drop in the bucket. Wouldn't it make you abrasive and hyper-critical? Wouldn't you break book contracts? Despise exhibitions? Wouldn't your hair stand on end if you were famous, but all too aware of expectations you hadn't met?"
– quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)