SHOOTING OFF MY MOUTH
SPITTING INTO THE MIRROR
Lisette Model A Narrative Autobiography

Hardbound, 8" x 9½", 128 pages
51 tritone illustrations
2010, Steidl Photography International
By Eugenia Parry
Edited by Manfred Heiting.

From the Publisher:
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 teacher:“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 life: 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.