The exhibition at the Jeu de
Paume dedicated to the photographer Lisette Model enhances around 120
shots, her first series taken in Nice and Paris in the 30s in those
twenty years later in New York. As her images in black and white, gray
areas remain discreet about this artist. Lisette Model, born of
Austrian father and French mother, started in France. With her sister
Olga and friends photographers, she learned laboratory techniques.
"Influenced by the expressionist painting, she said she had no real
photographic culture," said Cristina zelichi, responsable of the
exhibition. "Do not take it that you're passionate about it," she
advises her friend and photographer Rogi Andre, first wife of Andre
Kertesz. A sentence will never forget it. "Take a picture with your
guts," Lisette Model repeated later when her students will bring them
into the streets of New York. Lisette Model photograph the characters
she meets at random from his wanderings in the city or the places they
frequent. "The way she used the flash isolates people from their
context. It really came home in his subjects," continues Christina
zelichi. In Nice, it carries the famous series Parkway English,
published in Look magazine and later in PM's Weekly. The artist
presents a look half amused, half-mocking on the European bourgeoisie
from which they arise. In Paris, she photographs portraits of anonymous
beggars, blind, lonely old ladies or middle class, without class
distinctions. The choice of models already hints at the turn take his
art in the United States. In 1938 she moved to New York, and chose to
stay away from anti-Semitic climate of social unrest which traverse
Europe. Series Reflections Running Legs or reflect the fascination for
this city. Until 1949, Lisette Model collaborates with several
magazines "engaged" with Harper's Bazaar, which does not hesitate to
publish her series taken in the streets of Lower East Side, the Bowery
or in bars and night spots she frequented. Artists transgender,
affluent bystanders or destitute, she never judges his characters. What
he is probably in the mid-'50s McCarthyism in full to be interviewed by
the FBI, suspected of belonging to the Communist Party. This event will
mark a turning point in his career. Her collaboration with American
magazines and decrease it will focus its course at the New School for
Social Research at Columbia University
