Model

Lisette (1906-1983). Austrian, naturalized American, photographer, whose full name was Elise Felic Amélie Seybert Model. After taking studies in classical music and painting, she moved to Paris in 1926, where she married the painter Evsa Model. In 1933, she embarked on photography, beginning with the portraits of unusual people that were to make her famous. Five years later, in New York she met Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, and the art director Alexey Brodovitch, and collaborated with Harper’s Bazaar. Her research centered around visual games, such as splitting images in the Reflexions series, the part-social, part-sociological analysis of her series of Running Legs, with the legs and feet of passers-by photographed from a grate at pavement height. Her work as a photography teacher at the New School for Social Research in New York was very important: the students strongly influenced by her work include Bruce Weber, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Diane Arbus.