The midcentury street photographer who documented New Yorkers in all their raw, grotesque humanity

Lisette Model, born into an upper-class Jewish-Catholic family in Vienna in 1901, didn’t set out to be a photographer. As a young woman she moved to Paris and studied music with Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Through Schoenberg, she was introduced to the emerging style of German Expressionism, in which painters used aggressive brushstrokes and exaggerated forms to highlight the psychological turmoil of modern life. After abandoning a music career, Model thought she would become a darkroom technician—then realized taking photos was more to her liking. She borrowed a 35 millimeter camera from her sister and set out to document men and women lounging on the beach in Nice. “The nascent photographer lifted the camera to her eye and captured them in a series of images that draw out the awkwardness of their well-fed, well-dressed bodies and the fascination of faces modeled by age, which appear almost grotesque, but also striking, even sculptural,” states Artsy. After marrying…