COLOGNE.- "Never photograph anything you are not passionately interested in!’ This advice, given to Lisette Model (1901-1983) at the beginning of her professional career by her friend, the photographer Rogi André, became the maxim for her entire photographic oeuvre. Born in Vienna in 1901, Model initially trained as a musician, studying harmony and composition with Arnold Schönberg, before taking up photography in the early 1930s. At that time, she was living in France, and it was in Paris and on the Côte d'Azur that she took her first pictures, which were soon published in Regards magazine.

In Nice, she captured the wealthy and complacent idlers on the Promenade des Anglais with her Rolleiflex and her characteristic socially critical gaze; in Monte Carlo, she took her famous photograph of a corpulent gambler, among others. The upper-class prosperity and carefree, sweet life captured here contrast sharply with her photographs of the working 'little man' and the clochards who eked out a miserable existence on the streets of Paris. With an unsentimental eye, Model made the social imbalance of society visible in her formally carefully composed pictures.

After emigrating to the USA in 1938, she remained true to her theme, photographing the precariat on the Lower East Side as well as the guests of luxurious restaurants. Her photographs of the singers she portrayed in the legendary New York bar Sammy's testify to her lifelong passion for music. In addition to her portraits, she created more formally experimental series of works that address the sensation of the big-city experience, characterised by speed and simultaneous sensory impressions: In her Reflections, she transformed the view into reflective shop windows into complex, overlapping image spaces; in her Running Legs series, in which she sometimes positioned the camera close to the pavement, she captured the hectic bustle of New York's streets. Her unadulterated gaze and the expressiveness of her images made her a renowned photographer who worked for Harper's Bazaar for many years, as well as other magazines.

The exhibition presented at the Julian Sander Gallery not only brings together motifs from all of Lisette Model's series of works but also provides further insights into the work of Gerd Sander. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he helped her work gain new visibility, not only through his work as a gallery owner. As an accomplished printer, he took on the task of producing new prints of her well- known motifs from the 1930s and 1940s. Working prints preserved in his estate illustrate his personal achievements in the darkroom – many of the negatives were in poor condition at the time, requiring a high degree of chemical and physical expertise and craftsmanship in the production of the editions. Furthermore, a comparison of different prints from the same negative draw’s attention to an often-neglected aspect of the medium of photography, in which the negative is the basis, but also only the starting point for the final print.

A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.