Book Review: A New Look Through the Lens of Lisette Model

Maybe it was blunt and sharp, far-flung and free or delicately expressive and flowery in the most outrageous fashions. Music and the stark images produced by photographer Lisette Model (1901-1983) are forever intertwined, whether the carnival sounds of Coney Island that backgrounded her most famously frank American work, the (a)tonal teachings of Arnold Schoenberg, her first true mentor in her native Austria, or the working men and women of her second home, the New York jazz world of the 1950s.

The existential dilemma that was jazz (Black identity rolled into the joy, sorrow and freedom of its sounds) and the capture(s) of its most vivid moments — live and in repose, alone or congregated — is the heart of this newly published volume of black-and-white Model photographs, a hidden collection lost to time and failed intention as the illustration to the written words of Langston Hughes and a book that died, back then, on the vine.

Gathered into Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures, with Hughes’s writing and that of historian Audrey Sands, its 200-plus deeply considered snaps weave an austere tapestry. There’s something arrant and stern in its unflinching looks at Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington deep in brooding, brow-tensed thought, or Billie Holiday lying in state.

But there’s also the ecstasy of drummer Chuck Thompson or Ella Fitzgerald caught within the glow of the spirits and the rhythm of the saints, the glee of an exhalatory Dizzy Gillespie and a smiling Count Basie, or an Erroll Garner at one with his piano. Of course, there are photos of Miles Davis before and after the birth of his cool, Gerry Mulligan finding his own brand of chill on the East Coast, and Art Blakey drumming hot. There are intimate photos of guitarist Josh White playing in his underwear and slippers, Horace Silver going wild on the keys as his hair falls across his face, and some truly foxy shots of a strapless Sarah Vaughan and an ermine-clad Carmen McCrae on the bandstand.

Then there are the excited audiences of the time, fans at clubs and festivals, most of whom knew that this music was rare, unique and could slice through their souls if they let it, even as they were cutting rugs on the dancefloor.

Remembering that Model was the woman who taught historic photographers Diane Arbus and Larry Fink to look, unblinkingly, at life’s most unadulterated fare, be it bare and bleak or perfect and pure, we get a deep and genuine kick (not always a fun one) at what it is to be gloriously unvarnished and to turn that into an aesthetic. Staring at the pages of Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures — each one starker than the last — is akin to getting lost in the music, only louder. JT