Running Legs

Lisette Model gained a reputation in her native Vienna and in France for making unconventional street images and candid portraits, a pattern that continued when she emigrated to New York in 1938. Model worked on assignment for Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue magazines and taught at the New School for Social Research, where she was a mentor to many young photographers, most notably Diane Arbus. This image is among the earliest Model made upon arriving in the United States. Model’s radical viewpoint heightens the crowded feeling of a city sidewalk packed with pedestrians in motion; it also resists the fascination with height in Manhattan, a famously vertical island, by keeping the camera pointedly downward.