Shooting Off My Mouth Spitting Into the Mirror inaugurates a new direction in photography and photography writing, as author Eugenia Parry offers an interpretation of the work of Lisette Model (1901-1983) through a meta-fictional soliloquy by theMoreShooting Off My Mouth Spitting Into the Mirror inaugurates a new direction in photography and photography writing, as author Eugenia Parry offers an interpretation of the work of Lisette Model (1901-1983) through a meta-fictional soliloquy by the artist.
Stepping beyond conventional critical approaches, it explores the psychic forces in Models life, her musical training and the peculiar process by which she transposed modern sounds into the unique visual gifts that distinguished her as an artist and a teacher: Everyone I photographed is some kind of animal, darling. Look again.
Youll see what I mean, writes Parry, channeling Model. My best pictures make up a personal menagerie. I combined whats bestial in people with whats bestial in modern music. Dissonance! Macabre violence! Im an animal of the ear, darling. Arnold Schoenberg was my great and only teacher. Parry extemporates on the facts of the photographers life: at the age of 19, Model began studying music with composer Arnold Schonberg and met the members of his circle.
In the mid 1920s, she met her future husband, the painter Evsa Model and in 1933 she gave up music, committing herself to visual art. Manfred Heitings design enhances Models images, and Parrys soliloquy accompanies a 50-plate selection of Models signature and lesser-known photographs, and excerpts from more than 30 notebooks.