MODEL, Lisette - Shooting Off My Mouth. Spitting Into the Mirror

Background information

"'Shooting Off My Mouth. Spitting Into the Mirror' inaugurates a new direction in photography and photography writing, as author Eugenia Parry offers an interpretation of the work of Lisette MODEL (1901-1983) through a meta-fictional soliloquy 'by' the artist. 

'Everyone I photographed is some kind of animal, darling. Look again. You'll see what I mean,' writes Eugenia Parry, channeling Lisette MODEL. 'My best pictures make up a personal menagerie. I combined what's bestial in people with what's bestial in modern music. Dissonance! Macabre violence! I'm an animal of the ear, darling. Arnold Schoenberg was my great and only teacher.' 

Content

Stepping beyond conventional critical approaches, it explores the psychic forces in Lisette MODEL's life, her musical training and the peculiar process by which she transposed modern sounds into the unique visual gifts that distinguished her as an artist and a teacher. Eugenia Parry extemporates on the facts of the photographer's life: at the age of 19, Lisette MODEL began studying music with composer Arnold Schonberg and met the members of his circle. In the mid 1920s, she met her future husband, the painter Evsa Model and in 1933 she gave up music, committing herself to visual art.

Additional information

Manfred HEITING's design enhances Lisette MODEL's images, and Eugenia Parry's soliloquy accompanies a 50-plate selection of Lisette MODEL's signature and lesser-known photographs, and excerpts from more than 30 notebooks." (publisher's note, © Steidl Verlag, 2009)

About the American photographer, Lisette MODEL (1901-1983)

Photo books by and on the work of Lisette MODEL