 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"I always wondered why people found my work harsh, brutal, ugly. Superficially, it seems that way. The critics didn't put this in the context of my musical formation. Had they known who I really was, the meaning of where I'd come from, they'd have understood why I had to work this way."
"It was in my head. A great bank account I drew from when photographing. In the view finder I saw Schönberg's musical dissonance, emancipated. Haven't I spoken about it, ad nauseam, darling? Dissonance is not only displeasing. It generates new feelings. Schönberg called it an incomplete sound that calls for resolution. I photographed people similarly."
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Sammy's, New York 1940-44 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"As far as I'm concerned, everyone I photographed is some kind of animal. Look at my work again. You'll see what I mean. The best pictures I did, assignment or not, make up my personal menagerie. Animal-people congregated at Nick's, Sammy's, Gallagher's, La Métropole, the Opera. Instead of seeing them simply as low-lifes, some versions of Weegee, think of the sordid, disconcerting, brutal sonorities of Alban Berg's Wozzeck or Lulu – music of anguish."
"I combined what was bestial in people with what was bestial in modern music. I didn't go after my pictures. The beasts arrived and enveloped me. I crouched low so that these despairing giants loomed in the frame. What was the veiled figure in the massive fur coat? Not human, as far as I could see. Subsumed in fur, this bear with a beaded handbag entered the Opera, unaware that it was entering a trap. Music, grand, and all-encompassing, would soon overtake it."
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
 |
| Lisette Model Opera, San Francisco 1949 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"To me, the camera is primarily an instrument of detection. I don't think anyone regarded it like that before. There were detective cameras, of course, but that was something else entirely. The Americans like to think the camera behaves like a mirror, and the image is a record, a document. Once I said, coyly, I didn't understand what a photographic document was. I wasn't playing dumb. I was the always-accommodating Viennese, darling, softening my convictions. To me, really, to any European, the idea of a photographic document is absolutely meaningless."
– quoted passages are from Lisette Model: A Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)