Getty Museum

[Peanut Vendor, Nice]

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

Lisette Model's portrait of a peanut vendor in the market in Nice is one of the most sympathetic portraits that she made. With his bright eyes engaging the camera and a slight smile warming his face, the unidentified street vendor holds a burlap sack filled with peanuts on his lap. His tanned, rough hands reach into the sack, cupping the peanuts as if he is both offering and displaying his goods. Emphasizing his working-class identity and his job as a vendor, Model mounted the print on a piece of the classified advertisement section of an English language newspaper, possibly done after Model moved to New York.

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