Authors: Patricia Bosworth
Throughout the 1940s Model photographed regularly for
Harper’s Bazaar,
working with Carmel Snow and Brodovitch on a wide variety of features—fashions on location, portraits of New York night life (Nick’s jazz joint, Sammy’s Bowery Follies). She learned to use a flash so she could photograph at night. On her own she did a series on feet—feet on Wall Street coming out of the subway, running down the sidewalk, standing in line at Radio City, shuffling, moving, stumbling feet; to her, moving feet symbolized the haste and energy and pace of New York—of America. “It’s exciting and terrifying,” she said.
She also made powerful studies of the immigrants living on the Lower East Side—and she photographed at Coney Island, producing perhaps her most famous image (it’s currently on the cover of her Aperture book of photographs—a huge, laughing, fat lady squatting in the surf, an exuberant, unsentimental expression of female vitality).
Sometimes her pictures weren’t used. She did a series on black delinquents in Harlem and
Look
refused to publish them: “They said they wanted white delinquents.” She spent months with the Pearl Primus dance company, but Brodovitch said her film couldn’t be used in
Bazaar.
“Hearst won’t allow photographs of Negroes in his magazine,” Brodovitch said.
After Brodovitch left
Bazaar
in 1951, Model began lecturing on photography both in New York and in San Francisco, where she became friendly with Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. The three celebrated women photographers often met to talk shop, and while she was with them Lisette Model took candid portraits—Cunningham in her garden, a close-up of Lange in Berkeley.
In San Francisco, Model won the reputation of being a formidable talker. “You couldn’t get a word in edgewise with Lisette,” a friend says. She would ramble for hours in a somewhat convoluted fashion on subjects such as the art of the snapshot or the wisdom of Krishnamurti. (In her photography lectures at the New School, “Lisette combined good horse-sense with mysticism,” a student says.)
By the mid-1950s Model had produced a small but impressive body of work—
Aperture
magazine, under Minor White, opened its first issue with a Model photograph. Her pictures were shown year after year at the Museum of Modern Art and it was as a regular lecturer there that she uttered her famous dictum: “Photography is the art of the split second.” She still had photographs published in magazines like
Camera,
but she made barely enough money to pay the rent. In those days there was no market for art photography—you could buy a Lisette Model print for $15. Today the same print is worth $1000.
At one point, almost broke, Model went to see
Bazaar’s
editor, Carmel Snow, who had always admired her work (“Carmel used to say to her daughters, ‘Listen to Lisette talk!’ ”). Model wanted to do a book on jazz musicians; she would take the pictures, Rudi Blesh and Langston Hughes would do the text—but they needed money to fund the project. Snow was enthusiastic; it sounded like a wonderful idea, she said, and she would ask Helena Rubinstein for $5000. Mrs. Snow then arranged for Model to meet with Rubinstein’s son, Roy Titus. He was equally enthusiastic and told Model he was sure his mother would not only give Lisette $5000 for one year, but renew her support with another $5000 the following year. He promised to arrange a meeting, but it was canceled when Madame Rubinstein fell ill. Months went by and Model heard nothing. Eventually she phoned Titus and he invited her to the Rubinstein home to talk.
“I asked him what was cooking. Was his mother prejudiced about me or what! And there was a long silence and he produced a letter Carmel Snow had written Helena Rubinstein warning her not to help this Lisette Model, who was a troublemaker, a leftist, completely unreliable. I could not believe it,” Model says. “I thought this woman was a friend of mine.
“Later at a Museum of Modern Art opening someone screamed ‘Model!’
and threw her arms around me. It was Mrs. Snow. I shook her off me so hard it threw her against the wall. ‘Don’t you speak to me!’ I said. But in what a voice I said it! Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who was standing there, asked, ‘Why were you so cruel to Mrs. Snow?’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you why in two minutes.’ After I told her, she understood. But Brodovitch had a different response. ‘Is that
all?’
he said. He was used to worse from morning till night—[the fashion business] was a world of intrigue and poison-pen letters, treacheries, prostitutions; these things were normal to Brodovitch, who was an extremely bored, extremely cynical man. But I was shocked.”
After that Model took few pictures and refused to let her work be exhibited. When she gave interviews, she would later contradict herself and exclaim, “I didn’t say that!” (She believed that once she said something, the thought disappeared and no longer existed.) Eventually she stopped giving interviews, subsequently gaining her reputation as “the Greta Garbo of photography.” She trusted no one but her husband, Evsa Model, a gentle, handsome, almost saintly man who rarely spoke but who painted vivid scenes of street life in New York. “Evsa was as talented a colorist as Mondrian,” Sidney Janis said, “but he wouldn’t push himself.” “Poor Evsa—he never made a penny,” Model said. “I always had to support him.”
The only time he showed initiative was at the age of thirteen when he left his native Siberia and “walked across Asia,” a friend said. “Through Japan, China, India, stopping at various ports—Singapore, Bombay, Port Said—before settling in Paris to paint.”
Now he and his wife lived an impoverished existence in Greenwich Village. “But they doted on each other,” a neighbor says. “Evsa was Lisette’s security blanket.” Lisette would talk and talk and talk—wild, brilliant, angry monologues—and Evsa would listen or work over her prints (“He was the only one who really understood my work”). Finally, after hours of her non-stop talking, he would interrupt: “Lisette, you are a wonderful woman, but you talk too much.”
In the evenings they might go to the Limelight,
*
a popular photographers’ hangout on Sheridan Square in the Village, and join photographers like Robert Frank and Walker Evans over coffee. And they would argue
about the importance of the “Family of Man” exhibit which Steichen had organized at the Museum of Modern Art. They all had photographs in the show, and although it was an enormous success, it proved to have little effect on the subsequent direction of American photography.
It was at this time that Diane Arbus began phoning Lisette Model to ask if she could buy her work—any print of her work—and if she couldn’t buy a print, could she borrow one and just look at it? Model told her she had nothing for sale and nothing to look at either, but Diane persisted. Model suggested she join a class she was giving at the New School, and sometime in 1958 Diane enrolled.
According to Model, Diane was extremely nervous when she came to the New School, so nervous she kept bursting into tears. At thirty-five she still looked like a little girl in her shirtwaist dress and ballet slippers. Model, tiny, imperious, with prematurely white hair she had only recently stopped dying red, wouldn’t allow her students to take notes; she was highly sensitive about being misquoted. However, once she got started in a lecture, she could be supremely eloquent, and she usually repeated her celebrated dictum: “The camera is an instrument of detection…we photograph what we know and what we don’t know… when I point my camera at something I am asking a question and the photograph is sometimes an answer… In other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is getting the lesson.”
Her basic themes: that photography has extended our vision, but in ways we still cannot understand; that photography was first viewed as a superstition—it is now an addictive craving; and that there is a big difference between what the eye sees and what the camera sees—the transformation between the third dimension and second dimension can make or break a picture.
She spoke of the basic choices a photographer must make: picking a camera, choosing a lens or a filter, selecting a subject, discovering what one feels about the subject. She talked a lot about technique, but in the end, she told her students, they must forget it—photography is about creating a picture.
One of her first assignments was to have Diane and the others photograph something they had never photographed before. For another class Model had everybody photograph a face, but not in an ordinary way—“photograph a face like a Picasso.” She urged her students to wander through the streets of New York carrying their cameras with no film in them: “Don’t shoot until the subject hits you in the pit of the stomach,” Berenice Abbott quotes her as saying.
She would spend hours talking about the importance of light in a photograph—light is everywhere, in all color; light has great psychological import. She often had a student walk around a model holding a lightbulb to show how it affects a face in terms of illuminating shadow—each face is different, so the light falls differently on each face.
She also talked about the relationship between the photographer and the subject—it can be a confrontation, a conversation, an occasion fraught with emotion, but some sort of visceral exchange is necessary and crucial to make the photograph valid. Larry Fink, one of Model’s early students, has said that after Model pointed out to him that a sensual transition must take place between the artist and the subject, it took Fink seventeen years to understand totally when she meant.
The initial photographs Diane brought Model were “little balloons flying in the clouds—fragile—wispy.” Diane told Model she had gone to the Ethical Culture School, where everything she’d done in art class was labeled “genius.” “This was not a good thing for a person,” Model said.
Their first extended conversation took place on a field trip to the Lower East Side (scene of one of Diane’s earlier adventures with Phyllis Carton). Diane brought her two daughters along, and they trailed behind as she kept lifting her camera to her eye and putting it down.
According to Model, she was very pale. Finally she told her she couldn’t photograph. Model asked her why and to please identify her subject matter. Diane said she’d have to think about it. The next time she came back with an answer. “I want to photograph what is evil.”
“Evil or not, if you don’t photograph what you are compelled to photograph, then you’ll never photograph,” Model answered and said later, “I had to push it out of Diane”—reach her where the deepest anxiety lay, the anxiety which fascinated and absorbed her and which she thought was evil. “And I pushed it out.”
Years later Doon wrote that she thought what her mother really wanted to photograph was the forbidden not the evil.
*
This was undoubtedly the case; Diane had always longed to scrutinize the perverse, the alienated, the extreme—ever since her mother forbade
her to stare at their nutty relative, the relative who smeared lipstick so violently over her mouth and made noises at Russeks. Diane had always dreamed of capturing the panic and loneliness in that woman’s owlish eyes.
Now, with Model’s encouragement, she began documenting people and places she’d been afraid to confront. “She liked being afraid because there was in it the possibility of something terrific,” Doon wrote. She would take the D train to Coney Island. She noticed a tenement off Stillwell Avenue, marched inside and discovered it was actually a hotel full of disoriented old people and a barking dog. She spent hours photographing there. “If I ever went away for a weekend, this is where I’d go,” she said. She returned to Coney Island again and again, sometimes bringing Doon and May Eliot along for company while she photographed the wax museum or Puerto Rican mothers or tattooed people. For a while tattooed people became one of her main subjects. She kept asking why do people get tattooed—for decoration? to hide scars? on a dare? The secret ritual of it intrigued her, since it was a combination of traditional art, physical pain, and sensuality. May Eliot remembers Diane photographing a tattooist and laughing and talking animatedly to the man; his stare froze every time she clicked her camera. May says she got a “nightmarish feeling” about the whole experience, although Diane seemed unchanged; she seemed “light and cozy” as she walked with Doon and May back to the subway; but she did seem relieved to be going home.
The hardest thing for Diane was trying to overcome her shyness, the nauseating feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever she had to ask someone to pose. She’d stop a man or woman who intrigued her by exclaiming, “Oh, you look terrific! I’d like to photograph you,” and the person would hem and haw and ultimately consent because Diane seemed gentle and unthreatening. “I was terrified most of the time,” she said. But terror aroused her and made her
feel;
shattered her listlessness, her depression. Conquering her fears helped her develop the courage she felt her mother had failed to teach her.
She believed that picture-taking is a profound experience because it involves the risk of seeing ourselves as others see us. She had been around cameras long enough to know that what people want is an image of themselves that is acceptable to themselves. “The very process of posing requires a person to step out of himself as if he were an object,” she told
Barbara Brown, another photographer. “He is no longer a self but he is still trying to look like the self he imagines himself to be…it’s impossible to get out of your skin and into somebody else’s, and that’s what photography is all about.”
After a while she realized that people paid attention to her when she had a camera in her hand; treated her with respect and kept their distance—gave her space. Eventually she wore a camera at all times. “I never take it off,” she said.
As she struggled to articulate her sense of style and content and her vision of everybody’s terrifying isolation and aloneness, she worked slowly and carefully, collaborating with her subjects. She began by photographing people at a distance, in the context of their environment; much later she shifted to close-up. “She learned from Model that in the isolation of the human figure one can mirror the essential aspects of society,” critic Peter Bunnell writes.