Lisette Model

Lisette Model ( born November 10, 1901 in Vienna as Elise Amelie Felicie Stern, 1903, the family changed the name to Seybert, † March 30, 1983 in New York) was an American photographer.

Life and work

Lisette Model from 1920 studied harmony and counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg. After her father's death in 1926 she left with her mother and her sister Olga Vienna and shuttled between Paris and Southern France back and forth. In Paris, she continued her vocal training continued, but turned completely around 1933 by the music from and devoted himself to photography.

On a trip to Nice, she met her husband, the painter Evsa Model know. In Nice, they produced an ironic series of pictures about the Nobel vacationers on the Promenade des Anglais, which was founded in 1935 with a social commentary in the journal regards, an organ of the Communist Party published. That you made ​​a breakthrough in the field of street photography. In 1937 she was a student at the Surrealist photographer Florence Henri.

In 1938 she emigrated with her husband to the United States. There she came in contact with influential people such as Alexei Brodowitsch, the legendary art director of Harper 's Bazaar and the photographer Ansel Adams and Berenice Abbott. Model photographed in New York hotels, bars and night clubs of the Lower East Side and Bathers at Coney Iceland. In addition, the formalist work shop window reflections and Ongoing legs emerged.

To the FBI during the McCarthy era distract from her series of images in regards, they dated back her photo series on the Promenade des Anglais in retrospect to 1937.

Among the famous personalities who portrayed include Frank Sinatra and Georges Simenon. In 1952 she began a series of photographs of jazz. She photographed, among others, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. From 1957 she taught photography at New York's New School for Social Research. Her most famous pupil was Diane Arbus and Bruce Weber. Lisette Model died in 1983 in a New York hospital.