Louis Armstrong, photographed by Lisette Model on a tour bus at the Newport Jazz Festival, in Rhode Island, 1956.

Ella Fitzgerald at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1956.

*Top,* the record producer Ollie McLaughlin and other attendees of the Newport Jazz Festival at an after-party in the critic Marshall Stearns’s hotel room, 1956; *above,* the drummer Art Taylor at the New York Jazz Festival, 1957.

The bassist Percy Heath at the New York Jazz Festival, 1956.

Billie Holiday rehearsing at the home of the musician William Dufty and his wife Maely Bartholomew, New York, 1956.

The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie at the New York Jazz Festival, 1956.

*Top,* Armstrong and the singer Velma Middleton at Basin Street East, a nightclub in New York, circa 1954–56; *above,* the singer Joe Williams at the New York Jazz Festival, 1957.

Three photographers at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1956.

The saxophonist and flautist Bud Shank at the New York Jazz Festival, 1956.

The publicist Harriette Kahrs at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1956.

*Top,* the musician Josh White Jr. and his father, the singer and guitarist Josh White, at the Music Inn, a venue in Lenox, Massachusetts, 1956; *top,* Armstrong at Basin Street East, circa 1954–56.

Two attendees of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1956.

The pianist Bud Powell at the New York Jazz Festival, 1957.

*Top,* Gillespie outside the Music Inn, 1956; *above,* the pianist and organist Count Basie at the New York Jazz Festival, 1957.

All That Jazz

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday … a new coffee-table book captures the American music scene of the 1950s with never-before-seen photographs by Lisette Model and text by Langston Hughes

The Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model played it by ear. “I just picked up my camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad,” she once said of her career’s beginnings. Born in Vienna in 1901, Model had a Catholic mother and Jewish father. In 1937, she married the Jewish painter Evsa Model, and a year later, amid rising anti-Semitism, the couple fled to New York City. But life across the Atlantic wasn’t simple, either. Model would later face McCarthy-era scrutiny for alleged Communist ties. Still, her career blossomed.

It began with her most recognized image, Coney Island Bather—a portrait of a large woman posed happily on the beach in a football-huddle squat. And it continued through her tenure as a beloved New School professor who taught Larry Fink and Diane Arbus (who claimed she “became a photographer” after three classes with Model), culminating in a highly coveted Guggenheim Fellowship. Through all of this, Model quietly documented the city’s underground jazz scene. Did we mention she played it by ear?

That secret project surfaced only after her death, in 1983, when some 1,500 negatives were discovered in her West Village apartment. Shot over a decade in jazz clubs, backstage rooms, and on tour buses, the images capture a roster of musicians—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Anita O’Day, Willie “the Lion” Smith—expansive enough to make Bob Blumenthal jealous.

A new book titled The Jazz Pictures gathers together this remarkable archive and includes an introduction by Langston Hughes, originally written for a book Model hoped would be published in her lifetime but wasn’t.

If it seems surprising that a Jewish immigrant, classically trained in music, was drawn to a genre defined by Black culture, improvisation, and fervor, Model herself settled the question: “I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz, because I knew that was America. And that was something I really wanted to photograph.” —Carolina de Armas

Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at Air Mail

Photos: © Lisette Model Foundation, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation (all); Lisette Model fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (Armstrong on tour bus, Taylor, Heath, Armstrong and Middleton, three photographers, Kahrs; White Jr. and father, Gillespie with camera; two attendees, Powell, Gillespie playing chess); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Fitzgerald, Gillespie on stage); Baudoin Lebon (McLaughlin, Basie); The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Art Resource, New York (Armstrong laughing)