LINCOLN, MASS.- DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is presenting Lotte Jacobi, Lisette Model: Urban Camera. This exhibition showcases street photography, portraits, and experimental work by émigré photographers Lotte Jacobi and Lisette Model, created while they lived in Berlin, Paris, and New York from the 1930s to 1950s. On view in the James and Audrey Foster Galleries, these artists' works exemplify the breadth of the revitalization of portraiture and innovations in photographic techniques in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Urban Camera opened to the public on April 1, 2016 and will be on view through September 11, 2016.

Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) was an ambitious innovator, expanding her work from refined portraiture of cultural elites to experimental abstract images. She grew up working in the family business of Atelier Jacobi, a commercial photography studio in Germany (then-Prussia). In 1927, Jacobi left her filmmaking studies in Munich to join the family studio at her father's request. The soaring demand for pictures of celebrities, film stars, and dancers in Weimar-era Berlin created a lucrative market for press photographs and postcard collectibles. In 1935, Jacobi left Germany for New York, where she re-built Atelier Jacobi. She used her connections within the émigré community of European artists and intellectuals in New York City to reestablish her respected reputation for drawing out her subjects' unfiltered personalities in her photography.

Many works in this exhibition are portraits of celebrities, performers, intellectuals, and socialites in which the artist stripped her sitters of their social artifice to reveal their true characters. Drawing upon extensive technical knowledge of photography, Jacobi also experimented with new techniques and equipment to create surreal photomontages and photograms, velvety abstract experiments she created using a flashlight as a painter would use a brush. In her later years, she frequently printed her photographs on postcard paper, sharing them with friends and fellow photographers. This modest, personal format further reinforces the intimacy of her portraits.

Lisette Model (1901-1983) is best known for her candid and unconventional street photography of people across the spectrum of social classes. In France, she developed her iconic style in the early 1930s with her first major series, Promenade des Anglais (1934). Model’s dynamic photographs of the upper and lower classes in Europe sparked immediate interest in her work. Within three years of her arrival to New York in 1938, she had her first one-person exhibition in America, had photographs published in Harper's Bazaar, and drew acclaim from important art critics and curators.

This exhibition includes a selection of seminal works from Model’s oeuvre, with subjects as varied as a blind beggar in Paris, a bather on the beach at Coney Island, and a wealthy vacationer in Nice. The photographer closely framed and cropped her prints to emphasize the peculiar characteristics of each individual. Largely self-taught, she celebrated the camera’s capacity to document unseen or overlooked everyday figures in society. Her large-scale printing format enhanced the rough grainy texture from her negatives, accentuating the immediacy of these images. Model’s legacy as a teacher, mentoring famous artists such as Larry Fink and Diane Arbus, and continued influence on photographic practice speaks to the ongoing power of her dramatic images that elevated commonplace scenes and familiar characters into perceptive portraits.