Paris Born Elise Amélie Félicité Stern on November 10, 1901, in Vienna (Austria), Lisette studies music and the piano, she is in particular the pupil of Arnold Schönberg. In 1926, Félicité, the mother, leaves Vienna with her daughters, Lisette and Olga, to settle in France (in Paris then Nice). Lisette lives in Paris and continues her music and singing lessons and experiments with painting. She discovers photography through Olga, her sister who teaches her the rudiments of the techniques of photography in the dark room. Far from the studios, the street is her learning ground. She then gives up definitively music and singing, to devote herself professionally to photography as early as 1933-34. While in France, her first subjects are travelling musicians, beggars, merchants, middle-class man, of which she voluntarily crops the frame during the printing process. In 1934, she begins a series of portraits on the boardwalk in Nice. It is during this period that she meets Evsa Model, a Russian born painter. In 1937, they get married in Paris. In order to flee the tensions of Europe at the dawn of the Second World war, they obtain their visas for the United States and settle in New York in 1938. Fascinated by the energy of her new environment, Lisette Model photographs street scenes (Lower East Side, Running Legs, War Rallies, Pedestrian, Shadows), and store windows (Reflections)... 1940 to 1947, her most productive years, the city is her favourite subject. In 1951 (and until the year of her death), she teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York which will name her Doctor of Fine Art in 1981. Diane Arbus was among her pupils.