"Born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1901, Model started off as a musician herself. As Sands recounts in her wonderfully thorough introductory essay, Model studied with the Jewish avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg - whom she later described as her "one great influence" in life - but her musical career came to an end in 1933, owing to both vocal difficulties and the Nazis' rise to power that same year."
"In 1938, Schoenberg's work was denounced in the Nazi Degenerate Music exhibition, the lesser-known sibling of the Degenerate Art exhibition, which conflated Blackness and Judaism in a grotesquely racist dual condemnation of jazz and the avant-garde. Model fled to the United States that same year."
"She arrived in New York City just as jazz was exploding in popularity; "I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America," she recalled. Model dove into capturing greats like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie as they lit up a sparkling musical universe."
Lisette Model, a Jewish photographer born in Vienna in 1901, created over a thousand photographs of major jazz artists including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington between the early 1940s and 1959. Originally trained as a musician under composer Arnold Schoenberg, Model fled Nazi Austria in 1938 after her mentor's work was condemned in the Degenerate Music exhibition. She arrived in New York City and became captivated by the jazz scene, diving deeply into photographing its greatest performers. Despite Model's prominence as a photographer, this extensive jazz collection remained hidden until now due to government repression. Audrey Sands, associate curator at Harvard Art Museums, documents this suppressed history in the new book Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (2025), revealing the grim circumstances that forced Model to conceal her most significant body of work.
Read at Hyperallergic
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