Lisette Model

Lisette Model
Originally uploaded by realnyc.

Arbus found herself most drawn to the photographs of her
contemporaries Louis Faurer and Robert Frank and, especially, to the unusual images of Lisette Model. In 1958 Arbus
enrolled in a class Model was offering at the New School.

It was during this period of work with Model that Arbus decided what she really wanted to photograph was "the
forbidden." She saw her camera as a sort of license that allowed her to be curious and to explore the lives of others.
Gradually overcoming her shyness, she enjoyed going where she never had, entering the lives and homes of others
and confronting that which had been off-limits in her own protected childhood.

Lisette Model was born in Austria to a wealthy family in 1901. Her first artistic pursuit was music, which she studied
during the 1920s in Vienna and Paris. She switched to painting and then photography in the early 1930s.

One of her most famous photographs was taken during her first assignment for Harper's Bazaar: it showed an
obese woman wearing a black bathing suit, crouching with her hands upon her knees, on the beach at Coney Island.
Like most of Model's later work, the image was tightly cropped so that the subject filled the frame, giving it a radical,
confrontational style.