‘Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures’: A trove of jazz photo treasures finally sees the light

This new book presents nearly 200 beautifully printed photographs and tells the story of the largely unknown jazz photographs that Model made over a decade in the 1950s but that were only recently rediscovered.

Photographer Lisette Model has a life story that has stuck for many years. Model was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1901. Growing up, she studied piano and music composition, before moving to Paris, where, in 1933, she gave up music, changed to photography, and quickly became a full-time photographer. In 1938, she and her husband immigrated to New York City, where she fell in love with the photo community. Her work was widely published, and was included in the 1940 exhibition “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Aesthetics,” the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography. In the 1950s, she began to teach photography: some of her more well-known students included Diane Arbus, Rosalind Solomon, and Larry Fink. But she taught hundreds of other students at the New School for Social Research, while at the same time, she stopped making photographs.

But that is not really the whole story.

While she was working on her Ph.D., Audrey Sands was looking through Model’s archive and made an astounding discovery about the years when Model had supposedly stopped making photographs.

“I was amazed and surprised when going through the archive of negatives that’s held in Canada to find not just a couple pictures from this period, but as we now know, a couple thousand negatives and specifically negatives focused on a specific theme,” Sands told me on the phone. “The theme being jazz. So that was how I came to discover those pictures.”

The photographs were originally planned as a basis for a book with text by Langston Hughes. Model’s agent, Henrietta Brackmann, knew Hughes, and had reached out to him about the project.

“Hughes was deeply insinuated in the world of visual arts, but specifically photography. And we of course know his very famous collaboration with the Black photographer Roy DeCarava, ‘The Sweet Fly Paper of Life,’” Sands said. “Henrietta Brackmann reached out to Hughes by telegram, and it’s an illustration in the book.”

Hughes was very interested in the project, and there is follow-up correspondence in his archive, which is held at Yale.

But the project never came to fruition. With the rise of McCarthyism, Model’s involvement with the New York Photo League, which was classified as a “communist organization,” led to her being placed on the National Security Watchlist.

“Essentially it was that the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, who knew Lisette Model very well, was also very close with Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics mogul. Rubinstein was very interested in photography and the visual arts too, and had committed to fund the project,” Sands said. “But she had come to an understanding, perhaps through Carmel Snow, that Lisette’s politics were a thing to be avoided. And that’s how the project as a sort of formal collaboration with funding for it to become a book really fell apart.”

And with the end of the project, the photographs were filed away, and Model herself took extensive steps to cover up their existence, even though she had multiple opportunities to revisit the work in later decades, including when there was a boom in the photography market in the 1970s.

“She described it either not at all or extremely minimally in chronologies of her life, either completely eliminating them from those stories, or couching them to this very narrow period that we know because the pictures are dateable because they’re actual performances that happened throughout the 1950s,” Sands explained. “She would say that it was a period that she photographed jazz only from the late ‘40s to the beginning of the 1950s before abandoning the project altogether. And that’s of course deeply fascinating.”

Unlike her work from the 30s and 40s that is more widely known, Model’s jazz photographs are much livelier and more dynamic. Where her more well-known photographs are much more severe in their treatment of their subjects, and critical in their gaze and exaggerate the bodies, these photographs show not just her interest in the subjects in front of her. They show Model’s tender view and reactions to the jazz and the Black culture she was witnessing, at a pivotal time in the music’s history. She is caught up in the excitement and the play in the music and people in her viewfinder. And it shows through the work.

“The pictures themselves are just an extraordinary glimpse into one person’s travels through this roaring cultural scene that jazz occupied in the 1950s,” Sands said. “Just understanding that one person attended these numerous festivals in Rhode Island and New York and numerous clubs and photographed so many different figures and audience members and teachers of jazz, jazz history, and record label producers really just speaks to the density and aliveness of that scene as not just as a subculture, but a dominant culture of the period.”
“Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures” is published by the Eakins Press Foundation and can be purchased through their website at eakinspress.com.