Getty Museum

[Delancey Street, New York]

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: about 1942
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

A large man sits slumped on his chair, his head bent forward to his chest in slumber, his torn and stained shirt stretched to its limits across his belly. He leans on the chair back and nearby railing to support his weight, since his surprisingly small foot, barely longer than his pant cuff, appears inadequate for the balancing job. On the left, a baby's stroller suggests a domestic scene, its curved handle well within his grasp should he awaken to discover it there. The upside-down poster for theater entertainment and the graffiti-marked brick wall along Delancey Street, a working-class neighborhood in New York, frame the subject and hint at the world in which he lives.

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