"What jumps out in her images of musicians, however, is the wariness in their eyes and gestures-even from the courtly Duke Ellington. "I know of no photographer who has photographed people as inwardly as Lisette Model," the photographer Berenice Abbott wrote. Perhaps shared experiences of persecution connected Model, who had fled the Nazis in Europe, with her subjects. Even as the U.S. government used jazz to promote America's image abroad, the genre's luminaries suffered racism and violence at home."
"But as the art historian Audrey Sands writes in an essay included in a new book of Model's photos, suspicion of her leftist politics led to the project's collapse; Model herself was investigated by the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy. When she died in 1983, Model left behind some 1,800 negatives from her jazz project, most of which were never printed."
"The drummer Art Taylor eventually relocated to France, where he and many other Black musicians sought better conditions. Billie Holiday, who for years had been harassed by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was arrested as she lay dying of liver and heart disease in the hospital. Model took a series of poignant postmortem photographs of Holiday, then never shot another jazz image"
Lisette Model, a Viennese Jewish émigré, immersed herself in jazz photography in the early 1950s and planned a book with an essay by Langston Hughes. Political suspicion of her leftist ties led to investigations by the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy and derailed the project. Model documented audiences in moments of rapture while capturing a pervasive wariness in musicians' eyes. Jazz figures faced racism and violence at home despite the genre's diplomatic use abroad. Incidents included police brutality against Miles Davis, relocations like Art Taylor's move to France, and prolonged harassment of Billie Holiday, whom Model photographed postmortem and then left jazz photography.
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