Diane Arbus, Lou Lanzano
Robert Miller Gallery, International Center of Photography
Lisette Model’s photography is more than a little perverse in its enjoyment of the ugliness and inadequacy in human experience. One Model photograph that has always seemed central is that of a voodoo doll large as a child and seated in a chair wearing a dress. The doll looks as if it’s alive, or was alive at one time, as if it were a mummy whose wrappings are coming undone. The photograph animates all the spookiness and malevolence in the world. The photographs appear to have an attitude toward human nature that can only be described in the language of neurosis. It is a form of “attraction-repulsion,”