Lisette Model at the Albertina Vienna
In July 1959, Lisette Model stands in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York, photographing Billie Holiday in her open coffin. The gardenias the singer always wore in her hair now lie beside her as a funeral offering. It is one of the last pictures Model ever takes. Two women, both surveilled by the FBI, both broken by the Fifties - one by addiction and racism, the other by McCarthy and denunciation as "politically unreliable".
How did it come to this? The retrospective at the Albertina tells this story - and it feels more current than I'd like.
Lisette Model is born Elise Stern in 1901 into an upper-class Viennese family. She studies with Arnold Schoenberg, wants to become a singer, but after her father's death must relocate with her family to Paris. Her voice fails; she picks up a camera. Her sister Olga's advice: Only photograph what truly interests you.
"Shoot from the gut!" - this becomes Model's credo, her trademark. In the summer of 1934, she sits on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, photographing the rich at leisure. What emerges is not documentation but a reckoning. The lady in the polka-dot dress with the fan, staring into the camera - exhausted, defiant, overloaded with accessories. The gentleman in the houndstooth suit with the cigar, whose hands speak the body language of someone with nothing left to prove.
Model doesn't call this social criticism. She refuses political categorisation. But the pictures speak for themselves, and when they're published in New York in 1941 under the title "Why France Fell", everyone understands the message: These people weren't paying attention while Europe burned.
But Model can do more than bite. In the Bois de Boulogne, 1937, she photographs an elderly woman sitting in the park, reading. The book held close to her face - perhaps her eyesight is failing -, her handbag neatly placed on the chair beside her, the tree trunk at her back like a shelter. No satire, no exposure. Just a human being who has created an island for herself in public space.
This range between sharpness and empathy runs through the entire body of work. At Sammy's Bar in the Bowery, early Forties, Model photographs a couple at the bar - he leans towards her, she smiles with a knowing, weary expression. The beer glasses between them, the light from the side. This is no caricature; this is affection for life as it is.
In New York, Model reinvents herself. The city is too fast, too vertical for the frontal gaze of Nice. She develops two strategies that speak to me directly as a street photographer.
The first: Reflections. Model positions herself in front of shop windows and photographs what the glass shows her - the reflection of passers-by, overlaid with the merchandise behind. People become ghosts, permeated by light bulbs and price tags. The stable world from which one might order everything dissolves. This is Noir.
