Lisette Model

1901–1983

Lisette Model (née Élise Amélie Félice Stern; American, born Austria) took music lessons with Arnold Schönberg as a child and continued her musical education in Paris in 1926. In 1933 she gave up music for photography, already publishing her first pictures in the magazine Regards in 1935. She and her husband Evsa Model emigrated in 1938 to the US, where she met Beaumont Newhall, Ansel Adams, and Alexey Brodovitch. Model’s photographic work centers on people as representatives of a social order. She shot photo series about society ladies, New York nightlife, and the circus and published her work in Harper's Bazaar. In 1951 she began teaching at the New School for Social Research, where one of her students was Diane Arbus.