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| Lisette Model Bois de Boulogne, Paris ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Woman Reading ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Destitute Woman seated on Bench ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"I identified completely with the forgotten. As I photographed, they became an aspect of my self-portrait. I wasn't using the camera for fun. The financial independence I was used to was eroding. One false step and I could have ended up like any one of the sleepers, or the guy selling peanuts – in a second! I was attracted to the blind for the same reason. Do I need to explain why? And to old ladies, absorbed in books and newspapers in the park at Vincennes, the Bois de Boulogne, along the Paris boulevards. They never raised their heads to acknowledge my silent presence. I understood their exclusion. Their concentration. They were me in my father's library."
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| Lisette Model Four Women of Nice ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Bishop, Nice ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Circus Man, Nice ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"In big animals I found marvelous, primal souls. No different from big people, and big people attracted me tremendously. In Nice, I photographed the back of a large circus man. The fat on his neck had a strange expression. I cropped and enlarged the negative. I wanted to see what kind of a creature it would become. – That's what I told my students, later, about enlarging. The circus performer seemed about the explode his boundaries. He became an abstraction of latent animal brutality."
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| Lisette Model Young Boy holding Baby ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Flower Vendor ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Man mending Net, Nice ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Promenade des Anglais, Nice ca. 1934 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Promenade des Anglais, Nice ca. 1934 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"On the Promenade des Anglais, nearly every big, fat Fresser was spiritually dead. But there was this strange presence. . . . Later, everyone marveled at my ability to get so close to people I made look so ugly. It was easy. They were my people. I was at home. Fashionably dressed, like they were, completely unthreatening. They submitted, automatically. In the southern French sunlight, I walked into their sterile daydreams. Before anyone had time to resist, I'd shoot and move on to the next. I was fearless."
"Later, PM a New York newspaper, used them for a piece called Why France Fell and mocked the pictures by giving them titles like Greed and Boredom. What? I wasn't a social critic or a moral philosopher charting the decline of modern Europe! I showed the people on the Quai des Anglais exactly as they revealed themselves to me. See what happens when you put your work out there? Forget about having the last word!"
"These images from Nice and Paris were my first pictures. I loved making them, but I had no ambition for them, whatsoever. I was a novice. The photographs were trials, experiments. A beginning, darling, for a little girl (who am I kidding? I was over thirty!) trying to become a photojournalist."
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| Lisette Model Vincennes Zoo, Paris ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Vincennes Zoo, Paris ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| Lisette Model Vincennes Zoo, Paris ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"Photographing in Nice and Paris, I also used to visit the Vincennes zoo, I don't know why. I was amazed. Nothing in Vienna prepared me for the complete absorption I felt in menageries. Sleeping rhinos looked like ancient stones. Elephants, too. I packed them into my view finder, along with fragments of animals' bodies that made the creatures almost unidentifiable."
"Krishnamurti regarded surrendering to nature as the supreme source of healing. He didn't think much of art or artists. Seeing nature, really seeing it, was far greater than invention. Seeing nature was a form of meditation, a way to enter more deeply into everything else. It was the only way to change. I didn't have the moral courage to live as he demanded. But from the beginning, while photographing, I'd been doing exactly as he advised. Surrendering to animals, really seeing them, letting their peculiar mysteries determine my compositions. I loved their size."
– quoted passages from Lisette Model: a Narrative Autobiography by Eugenia Parry, edited and designed by Manfred Heiting (Steidl, 2009)