09/18/2026
Photography and jazz lovers, please follow linkinbio to be directed to a substantial Adam Shatz review of ‘Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures’ in London Review of Books
“At first glance this photograph of the pianist Erroll Garner – eyes closed, mouth open, his face illuminated by a source beyond the frame – might appear to show a parishioner in a state of rapture. It’s only Garner’s blurred hands that reveal he isn’t praying; he’s playing the piano. Or, rather, he is doing both. Garner is on stage at the New York Jazz Festival on Randalls Island, but he’s also preaching, bearing witness, testifying.
Garner was barely 5’2”; while performing, he propped himself up on multiple telephone directories. But he had a grand, orchestral style, steeped in both Harlem stride piano and classical impressionism. In 1956, when the photograph was taken, Garner was at the height of his fame. The woman who took the picture, Lisette Model, is best known as a street photographer. She counted Diane Arbus, Peter Hujar and Larry Fink among her followers. But the publication of ‘Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures’ – a book of little-known photographs – is likely to prompt a reappraisal of Model’s legacy. ...
It was only in 1983, when the prints and negatives of Model’s photographs were recovered from her apartment, that it became clear just how central jazz was to her preoccupations. There were nearly 1500 negatives related to jazz, as well as more than 100 prints. Why it took so long for these images to be more widely circulated in the four decades since her death is as puzzling as her own reluctance to make more of them. To look at her photographs of Garner, Horace Silver or Bud Powell at the piano is to be struck by her emphasis on musical performance as a form of work – or, as Thelonious Monk put it more emphatically in an album title, ‘Work!’ ‘Before I started to be a photographer, I was a musician,’ Model said late in life. Judging by her jazz pictures, she never ceased to be one.”
‘Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures’ is by Audrey Sands
Published by Eakins Press Foundation
Essay by Loren Schoenberg
Adam Shatz Harvard Art Museums
