Pour Lisette MODEL (1901-1983), photographe américaine d’origine autrichienne, la photographie permet de traquer les aspects d’une réalité en perpétuel changement. Photographiant de manière instinctive, audacieuse et directe, elle produit des images sans concession mais chargées d’humanité qui lui confèrent une place à part dans le courant de la Street Photography qui se développe à New York pendant les années quarante. "Photographier avec vos tripes", avait-elle coutume de dire à ses élèves – parmi lesquels figure Diane Arbus.L’exposition présente, à travers une sélection de 120 tirages vintage, les travaux les plus représentatifs de Lisette Model, depuis ses premières photographies réalisées à Paris (1933) et sur la Promenade des Anglais à Nice (1934), jusqu’aux images plus tardives réalisées aux États-Unis entre 1939 et 1956, à New York (Lower East Side, Coney Island, les bars populaires, les passants), ou à l’Opéra de San Francisco.   If Lisette MODEL took up photography as a way of earning a living, it is also true that she always fought for her own subjects, rather than simply carry out the assignments given by editors. She believed that for a photograph to be successful its subject had to be something that “hits you in the stomach.” This could be something familiar or something unfamiliar. For Model, the camera was an instrument for probing the world, a way of capturing aspects of a permanently changing reality that otherwise we would fail to see.Model always said that she looked but did not judge. Yes, her photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice were published by the left-wing journal Regards, in 1935, but she was not interested exclusively either in the rich or in the poor, and her images are much more about human relations. Her work evinces empathy, curiosity, compassion and admiration, and reflects the photographer’s attraction to voluminous forms, energy and liveliness, to emphatic gesture and expression: the world as stage. The critic Elizabeth McCausland has described Model’s camerawork as expressing “a subconscious revolt against the rules.”This exhibition of some 120 of Lisette Model’s most representative photographs illustrates the very bold and direct approach to reality that made her one of the most singular proponents of street photography, the particular form of documentary photography that developed in New York during the 1940s, through the camerawork of such as Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava and Weegee.longside the photographs, archive film and sound recordings of Lisette Model will evoke the photographer’s life, and there will be copies of magazines to which she contributed (Regards, Harper’s Bazaar, etc.).