Shooting Off My Mouth Spitting Into the Mirror: Lisette Model, A Narrative Autobiography: By Eugenia Parry

by Lisette Model (Photographer), Manfred Heiting (Editor)

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" the artist. Stepping beyond conventional critical approaches, it explores the psychic forces in Model's 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 "Everyone I photographed is some kind of animal, darling. Look again. You'll see what I mean," writes Parry, channeling Model. "My best pictures make up a personal menagerie. I combined what's bestial in people with what's bestial in modern music. Dissonance! Macabre violence! I'm an animal of the ear, darling. Arnold Schoenberg was my great and only teacher." Parry extemporates on the facts of the photographer's at the age of 19, Model began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg 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 Heiting's design enhances Model's images, and Parry's soliloquy accompanies a 50-plate selection of Model's signature and lesser-known photographs, and excerpts from more than 30 notebooks.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Kathleen Conklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just started this book, but am already enraptured by it! I bought it because the author, Eugenia Parry, was my favorite professor in college, and having thoroughly enjoyed her Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886-1902, I knew that this would be well done.

I am very interested in street photography, and knowing that Lisette was a mentor to Diane Arbus, it is wonderful to read Lisette's thoughts, as channelled by Ms. Parry, and to see not only photos taken by Lisette, but also various other related ephemera.