Photographer captures 1930s to ’40s street life
Barflies and movie stars, circus freaks and jazz musicians, street people and nightclub performers.
In the 1930s and 1940s, photographer Lisette Model prowled the streets of New York and Paris, creating intimate, unforgettable pictures bathed in inky, noirish shadows. Seventy-one of her distinctive black-and-white images are on display through Oct. 21 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in a dazzling show curated by the museum with the National Gallery of Canada.
Model’s ability to capture faces of ordinary, sometimes off-kilter, people had a clear influence on one of her students, Diane Arbus. But Model’s work seems to fit more squarely in the mold of documentary photographers who immortalized vignettes of urban life, from Berenice Abbott (a Model fan) to Brassai, and writers such as The New Yorker chronicler Joseph Mitchell.
What’s most fascinating about Model’s work is how she creates a sense of movement through composition, especially in her abstract series of “Running Legs” photos that reflect the harried pace of New York streets. Or how she focuses so tightly on her subjects that you can experience their joy and desperation, from a threadbare pamphletseller in beret and stained shirt on the streets of Paris to a smiling, zaftig bather on the shores of Coney Island.
From a 42nd Street flea circus performer to fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland to jazz legend Louis Armstrong to a cafe singer whose flying hair resembles a proto-Janis Joplin, the photos remind us of Arbus’ comment
that Model’s style taught her that capturing a subject’s specific traits makes them universally interesting.
This is a must-see show for lovers of art and the period it documents. (While there, also take the time to examine a clutch of Garry Winogrand’s memorable documentary photos, from JFK to Marilyn Monroe, on the museum’s second floor.)
It’s another example of the Boca Museum’s long history of photo excellence.