A prolific street photographer, Lisette Model (born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern), shaped post-War American photography even while under the watchful eye of the FBI.

Born in Vienna, 1901, she had a bourgeoise upbringing and a private education. Her father, a medical doctor, changed their name to Seybert in 1903 due to growing anti-semitism in Austria at this time.   Lisette studied piano and compositional theory under Arnold Shonberg before she moved to Paris at the age of 23. She continued studying music after WW1 until 1937 when she married Russian-born painter Evsa Model and retired from music to focus on visual arts. At that time Paris was the centre of European culture and Lisette would have been exposed to many people who were re-thinking the Arts and to many avant garde forms of artistic expression.

She began by photographing her sister who taught her how to use a camera, but,  as tensions grew again in Europe, she pursued a career in photography to financially support herself. In a series photographed on the Promenade de Anglais in Nice, Lisette cultivated her zoomed in, cropped street photography style, picking up details that captured a range of emotions. Although not a lot is known about her artistic development she did study painting with Andre Lhote, among whose other students was Henri Cartier-Bresson, which means it is quite possible she met and was influenced by him.

In 1938, the couple emigrated to New York City where she continued to photograph strangers, swapping Nice for the Lower East Side. She was captivated by the energy of New York City, which she expressed through her separate series Reflections and Running Legs. Interested in American consumerism and a culture very different from her own, Model began photographing Reflections, a series that explored manufactured images, and products or consumers in window reflections. She was recognized for her radical deviation from traditional viewpoint, and preoccupation with notions of glamour and anti-glamour. This series along with her work Running Legs attracted the attention of editors Carmel Snow and Alexy Borodovich from Harper's Bazaar, a magazine she went on to work for from 1941 through 1955.  As they began to immerse themselves into the culture of eccentric New York, Lisette’s work was regularly shown in Harper's Bazaar, Cue and PM Weekly. On assignment from Harper’s Bazaar, Lisette captured one of her most recognisable works, Coney Island Bather 1939-1941.

Model eventually became a prominent member of the New York Photo League  and studied with Sid GRossman. Despite the League's effort to maintain that it was a cultural, photographic organization, political pressure led to the League's demise in 1951. During its existence, Model was an active League member and served as a judge in membership print competitions. In 1941, the League hosted her first solo exhibition. From 1941 to 1953, she was a freelance photographer and contributed to many publications including Harper's Bazaar, Look, and Ladies Home Journal.

Model's involvement with the New York Photo League became the cause of much strife for her during the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, when the organization came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected connections to the Communist Party. Though the League was not officially a political organization, many of its members used photography as a means for social awareness and change, but Model herself did not identity as a political or documentary photographer. The League was eventually classified as a communist organization by the FBI, who interviewed Model personally in 1954 and attempted to recruit her as an informant. She refused to cooperate with the Bureau, leading to her name being placed on the National Security Watchlist. Because many clients were reluctant to hire somebody who was under FBI suspicion, Model encountered increased difficulty finding opportunities to work, which played a role in her focus shift towards teaching.

Model embarked on a prolific teaching career in the latter half of her life, both institutionally and in private. In 1946 she visited California for the first time, and became good friends with members of the Photography Department of CSFA, established by Ansel Adams in 1946. In 1949, she taught photography at the San Francisco Institute of Fine Arts.. She left for California to teach in part for economic reasons and due to her friendship with Ansel Adams, who extended an informal invitation to a teaching position. She stayed from August until at least November of that year as a "Special instructor in documentary photography" in the Department of Photography. In spring 1951, Model was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend Berenice Abbott was also teaching photography. The New School had a liberal, humanistic approach to education and a high number of European refugees on staff. Her unorthodox and very direct style of teaching made her a sought after and unique lecturer and she frequently used children's drawings to remind her pupils that photography should be seen as an exploration and interpretation of the world and not a replica of what was already there. She taught many photographers who became well known professionals although Diane Arbus stands out. She continued to teach, both publicaly and privately for the rest of her life. She was awarded a Guggenheim Scholarship in 1965 and an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts in 1981. Her first book was published in 1979. She gave her last lecture on 4th March 1983 and died in hospital in New York of respiratory disease on 30th March the same year. Her extensive and well preserved estate now rests with the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York.