Lisette Model and Her Successors

At Presentation House Gallery until April 20

“The camera is an instrument of detection,” says Lisette Model. She is speaking on an old, warbly tape, incorporated into a short documentary film on view at Presentation House Gallery. Titled “Lisette Model: In Her Own Words”, it complements the exhibition, Lisette Model and Her Successors. “When I point my camera at something, I’m asking a question,” she continues, “and sometimes the image is the answer.”

Born in Austria in 1901, fledged as an artist in France during the 1920s and ’30s, and a resident of the United States from 1938 until her death in 1983, Model is considered part of the New York School of photographers. This informal group lived and worked in that great city in the middle of the 20th century and challenged the conventions of both photojournalism and fine art photography. Through her example, her teaching, and her mentoring, Model strongly influenced a succeeding generation, including Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, Peter Hujar, and Rosalind Solomon.

Organized by the Aperture Gallery in New York, this is a big, absorbing show. Its 134 black-and-white photographs by 14 artists demand and reward a commitment of time and close looking. Model is represented here by 19 works, including shots of the leisure class on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, legs striding along 5th Avenue in New York, reflections in shop windows, patrons of Sammy’s Bar, and jazz musicians at work.

Also on view are a couple of her best-known photos: Coney Island, Standing, which shows a large, laughing bather, dripping seawater, crouched like a sumo wrestler, commanding the sand and the surf; and San Francisco, depicting a thin, wrinkled, poignantly overdressed old woman, perched like an egret in drag on a park bench.

The show ably demonstrates the impact of Model’s distinctive approach, especially to street photography, although there are two heroic landscapes by Lynn Davis that look strangely incongruous here. Model’s unpicturesque subjects, her provisional ways of framing them, and her grainy, candid style are felt throughout the show. So is the frankness of her address of the everyday, of a banality that verges on the grotesque.

This last impulse is amplified in Arbus’s photos of the marginal, the weird, and the downright freakish; in Fink’s shots of deeply unattractive people at balls, conventions, and birthday parties; and in Hujar’s images of children’s corpses in the Palermo Catacomb. It is also manifested in Solomon’s “Dolls and People” series and in her Mother and Child at Erlanger Hospital, Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.A. In this work, a toddler with a bandaged arm, sitting on her young mother’s lap, looks exactly like a doll herself.

Model says that she was shocked when she began developing her photographs, early in her career, “so great was the difference between what I saw and what came out of my camera.” It is this strange disjunction between the sympathetic and the predatory, in her work and in that of her successors, that both compels and perplexes us. Model speaks of her passionate response to her subjects, to the vitality they exude or the life they wear on their faces and bodies. In explaining her images of overweight women and men, for instance, she describes her attraction to large, round shapes. And yet somehow, wrongly or rightly, we infer a less loving and more ruthless vision at work. Something transformative is happening inside her camera—and behind our eyes.