Lisette Model’s ’50s jazz pictures were nearly lost to McCarthyism

Revolutionary street photographer Lisette Model (1901 – 1983) died with a major body of work left largely unseen, until now. With the publication of Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures (Eakins Press Foundation), editor Audrey Sands, Associate Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, unearths a paean to perhaps America’s greatest art form – jazz – which singer Nina Simone famously described as ​“Black classical music.” 

Made over a 10-year period during the 1950s, Model took her work to the grave, allowing just a passing mention of it in her self-titled 1979 Aperture monograph. Sands, who wrote her PhD dissertation on the Jewish-Austrian photographer who fled Europe in 1938, unearthed a repository that includes nearly 1,500 medium format 35mm negatives of nightclubs, festivals, audiences and musicians, featuring artists including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong. 

The photographs – made during the final years of segregation – reveal the transcendent genius and power of the Black American music genre. For Model, who trained as a classical pianist and singer in Europe for a decade before she became a photographer, The Jazz Pictures was both a return to her first love and an awakening to the political realities of her adopted homeland. 

• Read next: A visual history of resistance in New York City

But while she was documenting the jazz scene’s heyday, the ​‘Red Scare’ loomed large as Senator Joseph McCarthy led the charge against Americans suspected of having connections to the Communist Party. The fabled New York Photo League, of which Model was a part, fell under scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. At the command of McCarthy, the FBI opened an investigation of Model in 1952 – 53, assessing her activities from 1947 forward. The 28-page declassified file still protects the names of informants, whose false accusations threatened Model’s life and livelihood, despite the fact the FBI ultimately decided in 1954 not to include her on the National Security Watchlist. 

But the damage had been done. Soon thereafter Model lost funding for The Jazz Pictures from philanthropist Helena Rubinstein after Carmel Snow – then editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar – allegedly sent a letter of warning about the leftist ​“troublemaker” to the cosmetics magnate.

Recognising the 1950s as an insufficiently understood period in American photography, Sands says: ​“I think McCarthyism is a huge part of the story. The most potent quote I read of anything Lisette Model ever said [in a letter describing the atmosphere of suspicion around the blacklisting of the Photo League in 1947] was that: ​‘It was terrible. You didn’t know what to photograph.’” 

• Read next: Sombre, tender photos of final goodbyes during the Harlem Renaissance

Model played her cards close to the vest, continuing with The Jazz Pictures as an act of resistance. She said nothing, wrote nothing, left no trace. But Sands would not be deterred. ​“As a very obsessive historian, I love a primary source. I love being able to cite something, and her archive is both incomplete and not fully explained,” she says. ​“I became really interested in why Lisette was motivated to change her stories and redact full interviews. What was at stake for her?” 

Sands looks to her own life for answers that might illuminate Model’s behaviour. ​“My father is a Holocaust survivor, and I know almost nothing about his life,” she says. ​“He lost both his parents as a result of World War II, immigrated to America and changed his name twice, not unlike Lisette, then electively changed his name once more and claimed to have no memory of his childhood. It’s clear to me that’s both a survival mechanism, a trauma response, and a form of self-protection. It made me realise we’re not entitled to other people’s full stories.” 

In jazz, Model found a path to freedom alongside those who have been fighting for it since 1619, when enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America. In Billie Holiday she saw a woman of courage and strength, who sung of ​‘Strange Fruit’ – a protest song in response to the more than 3,400 Black men, women, and children brutally lynched by whites mobs. In turn Holiday was viciously targeted by FBI and Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, leading to her untimely death at age 44 on July 17, 1959. This is where The Jazz Pictures ends. 

• Read next: London’s flourishing jazz scene is just getting started

Model attempted to photograph Holiday in her casket, in the funerary tradition of James Van Der Zee, only to experience a bout of temporary blindness. Despite this, she made the pictures and ended the project, never to speak on it again.

Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures, edited by Audrey Sands, is published by Eakins Press Foundation. All photographs © Lisette Model Foundation, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

Buy your copy of Huck 82 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.