All right, let's do this. Peanut, if you're staying in the room, no talking. Hello and welcome to the Photo Work Podcast, the talky and touchy feely version of my book, Photo 40 Photographers on Process and Practice, published by Aperture. Yes. That's new. I mean, it's not new that it's published by Aperture, but.
I'm going to come back. I'm going to circle back to that a little later in our intro. Okay.
I'm just going to say that someone from Aperture asked me, why don't I ever say published by Aperture? Because obviously. And I think maybe just because, you know, was a little wordy, but it's all wordy.
Well, now we've said Aperture four or five times.
Right, Exactly.
Good.
There you go. And I'm very proud that it was published. Continues to be printed by Aperture. Okay. Anyway, Joined as usual. This is Sasha Wolf recording from Woodstock, New York.
You only have room in your brain for so many names.
Oh, yeah. No, the train's off the tracks. Any bump and it's. Yeah. Joined as usual by that guy. The guy who's laughing. Mr. Michael Chovindalton. Good morning, Michael. How are you?
Good morning. Oh, doing well, doing well. I just installed a student show for the summer with my students in our gallery club and.
Very nice.
Yeah, we have our reception coming up and then, yeah, it's off to the races with summer and I'm doing a workshop in Trenton and that's about it.
Are you. Is the boat getting in the water this year? Not to bring up a sore subject, but
I don't know anymore. I don't know.
Moving right along. Moving right along. Well, we know you'll be up here with me.
Yes. You've made quite a bit of progress with what's going on for you.
Yeah, yeah. I'm moving tonight. Tomorrow.
Wow.
To a new house in Woodstock. A fixer upper. So many friends will be employed. Hey, kids, let's paint this fence.
Employed. Is that in quotes?
No. No. Yeah. Employed. Manipulated.
Fed. How about Fed?
Definitely Fed. Definitely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So exciting. And the foundation is, you know, just really doing such fantastic work. And I just got to see some new work from our junior fellows from this year that was incredibly impressive. And actually I'm putting together a slideshow of the work of all of our fellows since we started a few years ago. And just getting to work with hundreds of images by them has been, well, frankly, really reassuring that we've.
Things are going well.
Things are going well. Talented bunch and. Yeah.
Well, you have such an incredible group
of mentors, incredible mentors, folks who have been on our juries have just done such a great job. And so it's really been wonderful. I'm really filled with, like, I just. Yeah, I feel proud, I guess, and also just such a deep sense of. I don't know, like, deep satisfaction with, you know, what we've managed to build out. And incredible. And so incredibly engaged. I continue, thank God, to just, you know, love getting to it every day and doing the work and continue to love doing the podcast. And I'm going to segue into today's guest, which was really just a conversation I loved so much. Today's guest is the historian and curator writer Audrey Sands. And she came on sort of on the occasion of this recent publication that she was working on for many years that was published by Aikens Press, called Lisette the Jazz Pictures. Really an incredible research accomplishment, Wonderful book. But then we really just talked about so many things, and Audrey was so wonderful, really getting into the history of photography that, as folks will hear in this episode, I was like, wow, Audrey, you should come on again and talk about the history. Because I think a lot of people don't know that much photo history, even photographers, frankly. And she's a great teacher. Like, I loved listening to her talk about all this stuff.
Absolutely. You know, first I want to apologize if people can hear the leaf blowers, which is the soundtrack of all my summers here in Rutherford, but I'm not sure if it's coming through, but it's inevitable.
You shall be forgiven.
Yes. This was so good. I think I wrote you. I was in my happy nerd zone listening to it. I do love photo history, and I especially love this era that we're in right now of research and discovery. I had Anika Burgess with flashes of brilliance on my show, and then Odette England, who did the Long Shadow about Marion Post Wolcott, and her latest book is the Next Beautiful. I think when I was speaking with Odette, I meant. And this is what I said, I was going to circle back to this part of the start of my rediscovery of great writing and Things that Are Happening in Photography was the eponymous book for the photo work. And when you and I were on my show together talking about that book, I became reinterested in what's happening with this, you know, these incredible researchers and writers and photographers who are writing about photography. And this is just sort of the continuation of that and the conversations you have about not just sort of the history of photography, but the History of collecting. Why photography is what it is today, because how it started so differently from the other visual arts, the photo booms and the rise of galleries. I mean, it's incredible. And what's really interesting is that Audrey mentions Jonathan Crary studying with Jonathan Crary, who I also studied with at Columbia. It turns out Audrey and I were a year apart at Columbia.
Oh, my God. That's amazing.
Yeah, I know. I wrote her about this.
That's so cool.
Crary inspired me to. To get back into thinking about the history of the arts because he was so good at connecting culture with history. And that's what Audrey does.
Yeah, for sure.
In this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. And I just loved it. I could just go on and on about how excited I am about what's happening with, again, the recent research and discoveries and the history of photography.
Yeah, no, I'm with you 100%. So I think we will try and get Adrian again, in all seriousness, to talk more. And again, it's like, you know, when you find someone who is able to talk about history, in this case, the history of photography, but in such a engaging and charming and relatable way, it's. To me, that's like a treasure. So I think you and I were joking before we started recording about Audrey. Trying to rope Audrey into being our resident historian, but yes, our resident time traveler. Photography going backwards. But, you know, understanding that foundation is not only important, it's fun, man. It's really fun. So I think we will do that. And we actually have already recorded another conversation with a wonderful historian and curator that will be coming up soon. Sort of different subject, but I think that these conversations are really important. So, in fact, we've got. You and I were also just talking about what a wonderful summer of guests we have coming up. So really excited. Anyway, why don't we get to today's show? Michael, if you don't mind, please take it away.
My pleasure. And here is your conversation with Audrey Sands.
Audrey Sands, welcome to the Photoork podcast. It's so great to have you on. I've been really looking forward to this and much to discuss. So let's start as we always do, and introduce yourself to the folks listening who may not know who you are. Tell them about your journey, where you grew up, how you got into photography, and all that fun stuff.
Sure. Sounds. Sounds good. Thank you so much, Sasha, for inviting me on the podcast. I'm such a huge fan, and it's a pleasure to be here with you.
Thank you.
I am Audrey Sands. I'm a photography curator at the Harvard Art Museums, where I've been for just over a year now. I grew up in Los Angeles and from a very young age studied art history. I became really enamored with it in high school where, having had a background as a maker and as a curious teen thinker, found that art history was a place where so many of the different avenues of thinking that really enticed me could come together and coalesce. So philosophy and music, history and history itself, and visual studies. And I really found that all of those could be each lenses through which one could interpret works of art. And I think for me, always art felt like something that is meant to be unstable and unfixed and interpretation something that is really fluid and renewed at different ages and through different perspectives. And that's what really brought me to art history. And so right away, when setting out to go to college, I knew that art history was the thing. And where better to study that than in New York? I went to Barnard College and studied there and was not a photography person initially. I was a. Not even a 19th or 20th century person. So I was very pre photographic. In my early art history studies. I landed on the 18th century. I studied with people like Benjamin Buchlow and Jonathan Carreary and Ann Hugonet and Rosalind Deutsch, all of whom I think had perspectives around how the visual and the political and the social overlay to inform not just visual experience, but making and visual interpretation. And so I came to study 18th century visual culture and what I came to describe as a social history of vision. I was really interested in popular visual culture, so forms of popular entertainment, fairground entertainment, different kinds of flyers and posters and the emergent world of natural history. And I was really interested in the role of visual representation in each of these different spaces and the ways that at times they aligned to inform meaning. Sort of variously scientific, art historical, creative, sort of in the world of advertisement and really stayed in that 18th century. Roland Barthy, perhaps? Yeah, I mean, I think like at the time Barnard and Columbia were still working in the legacy of a really kind of deep entrenchment of critical theory, which pretty quickly after my undergraduate years, I moved very aggressively away from. I did a master's degree at Oxford University and studied specifically the history of collecting, which became a huge, and still is a huge passion of mine. I remain really interested, I mean, as a. As a museum worker now, in how things come to be held and cared for in different kinds of institutions and thus deemed art historical. So working on a master's thesis within this sort of rubric of the history of collecting. I found that accidentally everything I was writing about had to do with photography. So I sort of meandered, like, I tiptoed very trepidatiously into the 19th century by that point, and was really interested in how, for example, people collected carte de visite portraits in personal albums and what that kind of personal collecting represented. I was really interested in how people acquired travel photographs in, you know, portraying places like the ancient near east and things like that. And then I ended up writing a master's thesis on hot air balloons. And at the time, my mother was like, why are we sending you to school to study this thing that's not even art, and certainly not art history. But for me, it became a topic through which I could explore how vision was organized in modernity. And I was really interested in the aerial perspective as one that is not a sort of natural, inherited view, but a man made one. And then something that, like, photography, uniquely took up through people like Nadar and other photographers who were interested themselves in the aerial view. But also kind of, what does balloon vision and balloonomania, how does that link to a kind of craze in the modern era for viewing things voraciously and newly and from different perspectives? And that sort of set me on this course. By the time I decided to embark on a PhD which, you know, for those of the listeners who are more in the field of practicing photography, doing a PhD in art history is sort of the clearest path to getting to work in museums. It's just a threshold of training that most people need now to get museum fellowships, but, like, not to say anything of actual museum curatorial positions. But I was sort of at a place of knowing that visual culture remained really important to me, but that photography had really kind of found a place in gnawing in my brain and, like, found its way into my heart. But I was still learning so much. I mean, I had taken darkroom photography classes in high school and sort of fancied myself a kind of skilled amateur photographer. I made a lot of pictures on my travels and when I was living abroad, but I really hadn't been focusing on. Photography itself is a discipline of study, and in just a couple years found myself just squarely in the middle of the 20th century as the place that obsessed me the most. I think, you know, for many of us who study the history of photography, one of the most salient aspects of that history is first, that it didn't begin as an art form as many of us know. And it isn't still just exclusively an art form. It's all kinds of things. It's like all the primary way in which we interface with visual information every day and communicate. It's a sort of form of memory, a form of science making, note taking and art. And it really wasn't until the second half of the 20th century that photography gained acceptance in art museums and through fine art commercial galleries as a collectible medium. And it was sort of there in those questions of like, what makes photography count as art? What makes photography collectible? This thing that is so many things all at once, what makes it collectible? And understood first and foremost through the lens of art history at all. And sort of weaving back that history, that sort of background in history of collecting, I settled on this sort of period of the 50s through 70s, really known in our world as the photography boom, the photo boom. This moment when institutions started building photography departments, when galleries started representing photographers producing limited edition portfolios for sale. That really became like my obsession, where still photography held so many of its early original trappings as multiple different kinds of things that perhaps first lived in magazines or educational displays or elsewhere, but were also having this like second life and identity as art objects and as collectible prints. And I think like a lot of my interests today really stem from that intersection of ideas that is, it's so
wonderful to have someone on talking about that. I don't think, I really don't think we've ever talked about this, except very briefly in passing where I've probably referenced how new art photography as a correctable thing is because, you know, certainly a lot of young people really are not aware of this and you know, how fraught it's always been and delicate as far as its place in the art world, which when we talk about the art world, of course, we really are talking about collecting, whether it's by institutions or by individuals. So it's really wonderful to get a chance to talk to someone about this. And I have to say it wasn't, you know, there's other things that I imagined us talking about and we will get to, including this fairly recent book that you have put out with the Akins Press foundation called the Jazz Pictures, which is just a fascinating book and thesis and pictures by Lisette Model. So anyway, we'll get to that, but I want to talk to you now a little bit about what you were just saying.
Of course.
So for folks who really don't know about this, yes, there was this. You can really trace back the Sort of beginnings of photography as a collectible art form in the 50s. And can you tell folks a little bit about. There wasn't a huge group that was. It was a rather small group that was sort of makers who were sort of responsible for this, as far as, you know, my understanding. Can you tell us a little bit about who those people were?
I mean, it's really interesting even to start with the framing, that it was makers that were sort of doing the advocating. And I think that on the one hand, yes, it's always been historically practitioners of photography themselves who understood the skills, the creativity and sort of the multiplicity that photography held. And I mean, even going back to the invention of the medium, the early 19th century, people like Talbot and other like of the very earliest practitioners were really aware that photography was a both and kind of medium, that it was both document and creative, expressive medium. And there are, you know, like throughout the 19th century, figures like Julia Margaret Cameron, for example, I was just thinking of, you know, were major figures who on the one hand were working as sort of professional photographers or sort of had networks of friends that they made portraits of, or amateur photographers who sort of among their many interests were learning about the chemistry and camera workings of photography in their free time. But in the 20th century, and really starting with like Stieglitz and his circle and then Steichen, but really by the 1950s, a number of photographers, but also people who began working, particularly at MoMA, Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen, you know, and then a young pioneering gallerist named Helen Gee, who opened a coffee shop through which she sold photographs, were really invested in this question of, like, why should photography be relegated to words like design or fact and separated from the fact that it was a highly skilled and expressive craft? And there were a lot of different schools. So it's not really like a thing that can be traced just through a few individuals, but sort of by the 50s, there was a sense as MoMA began collecting and exhibiting photography and a couple other museums and libraries began catching on, that there was sort of more on a bigger picture scale to photography than just all the ways that it served knowledge and information transmittal. And it was really by the 1970s that a number of different dealers, many of whom came from the print world, began finding ways. And I think this was kind of very much in concert with the infusion of photography into conceptual art practices at the same time. So, like, the contemporary art world was becoming more familiar with photography through some of its different kind of iterations, through minimalism, through the Recording of performance art through conceptual art practices. And sort of at the same time as dealers were trying to figure out like, well, how do you sell a performance for example? It sort of is only through the photograph as the document of that show that then they also began to think like, oh well what about these like Edward Westons and you know, Ansel Adams and Lisette models. And there was this kind of revisiting of all of these kinds of pictures that had had first lives either in the Farm Security Administration or in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and other kinds of picture magazines or even figures like Man Ray and a lot of Surrealist and Dada artists working with photography in that sort of avant garde realm. It was not the photographic print that were particularly valuable at the time. And Even by the 50s through 70s photographs were only sold for, you know, between 15 and 45 dollars apiece. There are like these amazing records of sales at MoMA of like buy a Christmas photograph for $25 and you could like take home an original Edward Weston print for that money. If only we had been alive and collecting then we'd all be, you know, very rich. But that begins to explode more and more as by the 90s, like major museums, the Met, the Getty begin to appoint curators of photography to head self defined departments and start building from scratch essentially collections that now number into, you know, the tens of or hundreds of thousands.
It's funny, I also think for whatever reason my brain goes to the, the schools and professors and I think of the sort of lineage of cortege to you know, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind
and oh, completely like at RISD for example. And it was really by the 50s and I think it was largely indebted to the GI Bill that suddenly there were all of these service members returning from war with, you know, with new benefits that could enable them to get educations. And many of them had been introduced to photography through the military and through their appointments in World War II came and just opted to go to schools to study photography. And that was would be variously nested in either design departments or sometimes fine art departments. But it's people at that time like Nathan Lyons and even Walker Evans and Harry Callahan, Berenice Abbott and Lisette Model who were like the sought after people to go and study with. And yes, that's sort of the formalization of photographic pedagogy in this self. Same era is definitely part of the picture.
Well, we could. This is so interesting. We'll have to do another show I think just on we could go down
a lot of these avenues, I'm sure.
Yes. No, it's so fantastic. All right, so let's get to Lisette Model, because she is worthy of our time here, as is this amazing new book. But before there was this amazing new book, you, I think, did your dissertation at Yale on Wisette Model?
I sure do.
Can you talk about that and then bring us into the book that just came out, the Jazz Pictures?
Yeah, absolutely. So setting out to write a dissertation, it was the first time I had sort of embarked on writing a project of that scale. And I really wanted to pick a topic that would touch on all of the big questions that I had about sort of how photography was finding its place in the 20th century in the United States. And Lisette Model came up as a figure who again and again, was connected to so many circles. So she was a European emigre to the US as were so many other figures, you know, fleeing persecution for various kinds of identities in World War II. She moved to New York in the late 1930s with her Jewish husband, Yevseh Model. So there was that component that automatically put her in a really interesting circle and history. And then she was a magazine photographer. She found her footing making money working on assignment for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar and worked shooting stories for them for over a decade. And really, like in the 1940s and a little bit beyond. And so that was sort of a way, like thinking about her specific history with magazines and with Harper's Bazaar became another way to look at the role of the illustrated, the photographically illustrated magazine in 2018 century American photography. And then she was a member of the Photo League, this, like, epic and influential group of like minded, sort of socially conscious activist photographers, most of whom were based in New York in the 1940s, which itself, as a unit, was both so essential in connecting photographers who had no really other way of finding one another and sort of lifted up their practice. It functioned as a school, as a place for exhibiting, and was also an organization that fell victim to Senator McCarthy's accusations of communist leanings during, you know, during the 1950s and was disbanded. And so her linkage to that really interesting narrative of a kind of socially conscious, socially committed photography that then fell under attack by the FBI in this, you know, particularly pernicious chapter of American political history was really fascinating to me. And then I think it was two other prongs for me that really Dr. It was one, I think, like most people know in the photography scape, are familiar with Lisette Model through a body of work that she made while she was still living in France on the Promenade des Anglais, a series of portraits of well to do bourgeois vacationers sitting and relaxing on the Promenade des Anglais, which she portrayed through a kind of really skeptical and critical lens. And so that body of work is like really familiar. Then there's Coney Island Bather, her just iconic portrait of a really sturdy bodied, like confident, gleeful, large, you know, large bodied woman on the beach at Coney Island. And then it's really her relationship to other photographers through which she's most notable. Her name comes up mostly in passing as Deanne Arbus, teacher. And that was really fascinating to me, like, what does it mean to look at somebody through the lens of influence, and particularly influence on one of the most important, well known, influential photographers of the 20th century? And of course, Lisette was not just Arbus's teacher, but a teacher at the New School for Social Research and privately for many, many decades. And it was that legacy too that was really interesting to me. And so I really sought out to write a dissertation that would sort of take in the whole scope of Lisette Model's multifaceted career and sort of all the things that it meant both professionally and creatively to be a photographer through these middle decades of the 20th century. And, you know, found too that she's just an endlessly fascinating figure. And as I'm sure we'll talk about as we talk about the book, it's not just through her really distinctive eye and sort of creative approach to photography and the kind of photography that she advocated for, but also through her refusals and sort of the difficulties that she presents to historians who, who have wanted over the years to take her on as a subject.
So explain what does that mean?
So when I started working on Lisette Model, there was, you know, there have been a lot of museum shows of her work at the Jeu de Paume, at the Getty, and most notably at the National Gallery of Canada, which is the holder of her archive in Ottawa. And it was really Anne Thomas, who had been the head of photography at the National Gallery of Canada for many, many decades, who wrote the sort of comprehensive archive based, deeply researched monographic exhibition catalog, sort of the first of its kind, this like deeply research driven, archive based kind of treatment of a photographer. And in it and in other contexts and personally to me, she really expressed how difficult of a photographer, difficult of a person, difficult woman, difficult Lisette is to work on because she refused interviews. She would redact fully conversations that she had had. She really famously or sort of story that came to be has come to be very important to me. Many people may know her very large scale aperture monograph designed by Marvin Israel in the late 1970s with Coney island bather on the COVID It's a book that is largely played photographic plates. So it's just mostly a series of images with a very brief introduction by Berenice Abbott. It was originally meant to have been accompanied by 120 page biographical text based on long form interviews between Lisette and the writer Philip Lopate. And at the very last minute, when she saw the text and felt exposed in different ways, she refused to let the publication go ahead with the inclusion of that text. And so in the sort of spher of publications and on record interviews, we're left with very little or with sort of inconsistencies. She would tell different stories about her age, about where she had or hadn't published. And in a way, this was sort of typical of a kind of survivalist mentality. Jewish immigrant survivor of World War II era persecutions, as well as typical of figures who were undergoing the kinds of investigations that were so rampant in the 1950s in the US but in another way, it was a kind of thing that became part of her identity. Her inaccessibility, her unknowability as a person and her insistence, like all you need to know about me, you can see in the pictures themselves.
Well, this leads us really nicely into the book that you've just done, that you worked on, I know, for quite a long time. That's right, the jazz pictures. Because I'm fascinated and dying to hear. I don't think this is explicit in your incredible essay that you wrote to accompany this book.
Thank you.
It's a really beautiful, very comprehensive piece of writing. And yet I still think leaves us with the question of why Lisette never did anything with this work while she was alive. So tell folks what this book is and then let's hypothesize.
Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much for, you know, for paying attention to the book. It's something that really came out of many, many years of deep thinking and grappling with Lisette and really what I wanted to do and say first kind of to a more public forum about her and as you know, sort of deep collaboration with Peter Kay, office of the Akins Press Foundation. The scope of the book is really that it takes on this sort of hidden decade of Lisette's career. Not that we didn't know where she was throughout the 1950s. We knew for certain that she was teaching at the New School. But it was largely believed that she had ceased photographing during this period, or at least that, like, what photographs she'd made were sort of dappling and mostly to be discarded. I mean, in the MoMA collection, there are pictures that she made on travels to Rome, that she traveled to Venezuela during this period. There are pictures that are fairly atypical of her oeuvre and, like, sort of, most notably of those bodies of work. Like, there are no people in the pictures. And, like, we love Lisette for her pictures of people. That is, like, what her primary contribution is, how she sees humanity and what she looks for in people and making pictures of them. And it wasn't that it was unknown that she had made a couple jazz pictures. There are prints in a couple museum collections. There certainly were prints in her archive. But it was sort of the depth and breadth of this body of work and her commitment to the subject of jazz that became a real fascination for me. In that Aperture monograph that I mentioned, there's a chronology at the back, and it says that, you know, from 1948-51 or something like that, you know, picks up jazz as a subject for a potential book and then discard the subject entirely. And so you think, okay, so these pictures that I've seen, a couple of Billie Holiday and of Louis Armstrong, they must be from this period of 49, 50, 51. And that's what they are. But as you. As I began really sifting through her archive, which is also home to her negatives, I found that There were nearly 2,000 negatives of jazz subjects, more than any other area or subject throughout her entire career. So that alone was fascinating. And so you're like, thinking, okay, so from. She was really busy in 48, 49, 50, 51. Like, let's go see where she was going. And to my then untrained eye at the time, I was willing to sort of take those facts, those sort of claims, I should say, at face value. Like, I didn't know at the time a lot about jazz history. So I just thought, oh, this is Billie hol performing in 1950. This is Bud Powell, probably also from some performance. But as I began to want to. Many of these pictures have no annotations, no dating, et cetera. And so to sort of try to piece that story together and sort of figure out, okay, well, who is in each of these pictures and where were they all taken? I consulted a number of jazz historians as well as just like going extremely deep and really nerding out on jazz performance history, going through archives, going through, through, you know, like concert listings, et cetera, et cetera, and found that in fact, like most of these pictures were made between 1954 and say 58, 59, a period where she had claimed to have moved on from this body of work. And so that just became a question mark more than anything. And sort of to your point of like, well, why would she, why would she conceal that? Or like, what, what is there to gain of like lying? I would still say that I don't have a conclusive answer. I really feel such a strong onus as a historian not to assume things. And so for this project in particular, I think there's such a sensitivity that I have always wanted to have to like get things right with her. And if I can't get things right, maintain my, or really be clear that my perspective is one of speculating, but try to do as much research as possible around the questions. And so I really looked to other aspects of her life during this period. What was happening with her career as a photographer and what was happening ultimately kind of around her politically.
Well, so it's fascinating because first of all, as you said, she was, it turns out that she was incredibly prolific and she'd fallen into this space with what seems to be a great deal of passion and commitment in some ways like no other. And she had a very strong background in music. She had studied music from the time she was fairly young.
That's right, she had studied. She had come to music as a young girl as like a preteen living in Vienna, growing up with her family, where there were close family connections with the family of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom she studied music composition and voice. She was self taught in piano. And really her first career and love was music itself. So that when she moved to Paris in the 1920s, it was to study voice with a master soprano. And it was really only after she found that also under kind of mysterious circumstances that she doesn't elaborate on anywhere, she abandoned music and started studying visual arts, first painting and then kind of came to photography as what she thought at the time was more practical, a more practical way to support herself. But I do think, even though she doesn't talk about music a ton like later in her life and, and it's not like immediately she becomes a music photographer, although there was such a thing as like sort of professional photographers who would portray musicians either in concert or in studios. That wasn't what she was doing. I think that it stayed somewhere deeper inside of her as a kind of impulse and a sort of philosophy more than anything else.
Yeah, I mean, I find this all really fascinating just on a psychological level. I mean, I mean, to me it seems as though her passion for music ran very, very deep. And it seems as though she was really quite talented.
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, by music, I think there's sort of a need or a sort of drive to know what that meant for her. Like, how do you, by looking at a career in picture making and in teaching, see a love and importance of music? And again, as I say, it's not because she was talking a lot about music or like tonal systems or. But I do think that her influence, her early studies with Schoenberg and this sort of in the circle of expressionist composers and atonality, as well as Schoenberg's own teachings, to kind of follow your passions and not really attend to the concerns of the critics or sort of expectations to conform. That's really what characterized Model as a maker and as a teacher. This sort of anti conformist, like, follow your gut. I mean, those are the sort of quotes or sort of sayings for which she's most known to shoot from your gut and to sort of her insistence that her students only seek out and photograph that about which they're incredibly and deeply passionate. And so it's not so much that you like, see the character of music in her pictures as this sort of ethos of going against the grain and a kind of intense drive.
Yeah, I mean, I also just on a purely sort of pedestrian level, I feel like anyone who's self taught at anything has. As someone who's studied music on and off in my own life, I know that when it's not your parents sending you to piano lessons, but it's something you want to learn yourself, that that's a clue to something. But so she, you know, winds up with, you know, 2,000 negatives of not just jazz performers, but incredible pictures of people attending performances and in sort of various sort of states of, you know, what looks like quite profound involvement and appreciation for the performance that they're experiencing. And in typical sort of Lisette Model fashion, there's a real intimacy in these pictures, a real connection that at least she's feeling toward the subject that she's photographing. And she embarks early on on this project to do a book of jazz musicians with the great Langston Hughes. And they are fairly deep into a commitment to do this when cages are rattled by Senator McCarthy and this hunting of Communists or Communist sympathizers. And the project is abandoned because folks who are going to support the project financially are told that perhaps Lisette is a troublemaker or maybe not the right horse to back. And so this whole thing sort of falls apart as a project, a book project. But as we know, she continues to photograph anyway, but then never shows the work and never really acknowledges it, which is just mind blowing when you see this book that you've put together. And we get a chance to see the quality of the work. So tell folks a little bit about what the actual content is and the scope of this book that you've put together.
Yeah, so what's really interesting is that, you know, as you recounted, Lisette and Langston Hughes had sort of come to an understanding that they were going to work on this project together. And by 1952ish, that was sort of established and things were sort of quote unquote, well underway. But it's really not until the project completely falls apart that you see in the negatives and the print that she made from those negatives a real kind of, like, picking up with passion and gusto of the subject of jazz. She starts going to all of the major jazz festivals in Newport in New York, going to performances at different venues throughout New York City, Central Plaza, a bunch of other places that were really known for their jazz performances. But also, like, she becomes deeply insinuated in these really unexpected and sort of unrecorded elsewhere ways in the world of jazz. You find pictures that she made in Louis Armstrong's tour bus, where she clearly had sort of gained access to this deeply intimate space. There are pictures, there are negatives at least, of Dizzy Gillespie lying on the grass outside one of the Newport mansions playing Chant in an off hour. It's like these moments of repose and relaxation and sort of of these, you know, deeply established musicians letting their guard down. She's, like, embedded, deeply embedded in the jazz scene. There are no records in her archive that would explain how she came to have built those relationships. There's no correspondence that exists between her and Langston Hughes that postdate those sort of early years of them thinking through what a project might be. And yet he appears in some of her negatives and prints of, like, after parties in a hotel room or speaking on stage during a discussion panel on jazz during the Newport Jazz Festival. So part of the book project was to simply say, here is A massive body of work, like we should know about it. It should not just become part of our understanding of and a sort of view on the American culture of jazz during these years, during the 1950s, but also to hopefully inform our. And make more complicated our understanding of Lisette. Model this deeply influential photographer of the 20th century. Like, how does this entire decade of work change our understanding of her? And I think one of the things that I tried to do in this book, but I don't even really have to try, because you see it in the pictures and in the negatives themselves, like, is show how very distinct her treatment of jazz as a subject was from the rest of her work. She's so known as a woman with like a really searing, deeply critical perspective on wealth, on social caste. She is sort of described as having a mannerist approach or a kind of caricature like treatment, looking at exaggerated forms and body types. I mean, this is the Lisette we know, looking at people in circumstances of poverty or extreme wealth and sort of comparing those two facets and poles of society. And always with a critical lens that you see also, like impacting her fellow photographers like Weegee, or that then becomes a sort of thread that's picked up by many of her students like Diane Arbus, like Rosalind Solomon, like Larry Fink, who are sort of equally interested in sort of outsiders and sort of extreme poles of society. But with the jazz pictures, it's almost as though it's an entirely different, different self. Still deeply fascinated by people, by expression, but so tender and almost.
That's the word I was gonna use.
Yeah. And almost. I mean, not necessarily for the first time ever, but really deeply empathic. Like there's something in both the performing of music and what she sees in that. The sort of pathos and heart and passion that she really attends to in the performances, but also in, as you alluded to earlier, the experience of beholding music, the experience of the listeners. And so, like, not quite half, but maybe a quarter of her pictures are focused on the audiences of jazz in different settings. In the sort of living room setting of a very intimate school for jazz called the Music Inn, where people sort of lay splayed on sofas during after hour jam sessions or in the rows and rows of listeners at major outdoor arenas. At the New York and Newport jazz festivals. She's attending to what it feels like to experience jazz music. And it's really deeply moving. Her cropping is less aggressive. She not twisting things to quite the same exaggerated diagonals that she does in her other work. I mean, Lisette was somebody who, like, heavily worked up her negatives to make a print. She would crop very aggressively so that what you're seeing in the print is, like, as a frame is maybe like 30% of the original image, sometimes totally at a slant and made to skew and sort of disorient and exaggerate the experience of the viewer of the photographs. In this case, I think she's really so immersed, so attentive and reverential. Yeah. And just, like, careful with the subject. That it's an entirely different Lisette in a way.
Really fascinating. Let me ask you a last question before we wrap up, but I think is extremely important, I think be remiss not to. Which is, what, if anything, do you grapple with when you think about publishing a book like this, when it's clear that the artist did not want to champion this work herself?
It's such a good and such an important question. So thank you for bringing that into this conversation. I mean, I have such admiration and respect for artists and for photographers and. And I think that whatever reasons a maker may have for concealing a body of work, like, should be attended to. And also I think first and foremost of myself as a historian, and I think part of the responsibility to history is to ask questions about why, why, why would an artist like Lisette make a decision so extreme? And so it was never my intention to just say, oh, like, look at this extra body of work that I just discovered. And now we should just fold it in as sort of any other major area of her making, like, we just forgot about it. I think it has been that question of how do you attend to areas of erasure and silences in a person's career as something to hold very tenderly themselves? And so I think with a kind of eye to the complexity of this period of the 1950s as a period in photography that I think we still know not nearly as much about as we should. I think we just take at face value, like, oh, a lot of photographers who started out out as documentarians and socially committed sort of moved on from that body of work in that time, Like Berenice Abbott started making scientific pictures. And other photographers just sort of abandoned their deep interest in looking at social conditions on the streets of New York. Sid Grossman, for example, began photographing seagulls on the beach. And I think we just for history's sake, have to ask, why is there more than meets the eye to decisions like that? And I would never want to make claims to what Modell's intentions were for the body. And I think, like, part of why I still don't answer the question of why she concealed the work sort of fully outright is that I still maintain that we don't know. But the fact that it was important to her to cover it up is something worth looking at and may offer us a way into understanding how moments of extreme political oppression, not unlike the period we're living in now, where artists and creatives and thinkers are being told what to and what not to attend to and what kinds of language are okay in different kinds of institutional spaces. I think we have a kind of onus to history as a warning of, like, what those silences and pressures can lead to and how they can erase or destroy whole careers. And maybe there's a hope that if we can look carefully at those gaps and silences today, we might learn a bit or two about how important it is as a maker, as a thinker, to still persist, even if you don't find the space or receptacle or safe environment in which to release those words or words work now, maybe tuck it away and it can make a difference later on.
Audrey Sands, thank you so much for being with me today. It's such a.
Thank you.
Such a pleasure.
It's been such a treat to be in conversation with you. I'm so grateful for this conversation.
Likewise. And we'll have to have you back to talk more about the history of photography in general, because I think we haven't done enough and I think it's fascinating. And so we'll get you back as our resident historian.
Oh, my goodness.
No pressure, Audrey, really. Thank you so much. And thank you for, and Peter, for this incredible book. I urge everyone to check it out. It's so beautiful.
And thank you. It's been a perfect privilege to work on this project and it's even more of a privilege to see it find its way into the world and sort of observe where it finds meaning and
resonance, where it's been very, very well received. I will just add. Audrey, thank you. And yes, be well.
Thank you, Sasha. You too.
Okay, bye.
Bye.
Photo Work with Sasha Wolff is a production of the Photo Work Foundation. Executive producer is Sasha Wolf, and the associate producers are Taylor Salzback and Noah Lynn. The show is also produced and edited by me, Michael Chovendalt in a real photo show. Music is by J. Walter Hawks. If you like the show and wish to find out more about the foundation, please visit PhotoArk foundation and be sure to subscribe and review with all the stars on your listening platform.