Getty Museum

[Pamphleteer, Paris]

Creator

American Photographer · 1901–1983

Artist

Lisette Model began her creative life as a student of music. Through avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg, with whom she studied piano, she became exposed to the Expressionist painters of early twentieth-century Vienna. She never formally studied photography but took it up in the 1930s while living in Paris. An early piece of advice received from a colleague--"Never photograph anything you are no

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Date: 1933–1938
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Eyes puffy and squinting, nearly closed as if swollen shut, lips curled and slightly open, an unidentified man handing out pamphlets in Paris has been frozen in a split second of uncompromising reality. Lisette Model's unforgiving, almost cruel portrait exposes in him a shabbiness and ugliness that serves as a metaphor for society at its worst. Model frequently photographed greatly overweight subjects, as if to draw a parallel between the excesses of their lives and bodies. She mounted the print on a torn section of the society column of the newspaper, contrasting this gasping, sweaty man with the chronicles of the glamorous elite to emphasize her interest in the class struggle.

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