| Lisette Model Running Legs, New York 1940-1941 (ca) Gelatin silver print 34.6 x 27.1 cm National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada Purchased 1985, No. 29036, © Lisette Model Foundation, Inc. LL/63634 Curatorial description (Accessed: 18 December 2015)
Unlike some Pictorialist photographers, who saw composition as an element applied from an external set of conventions, Model believed that the subject determined it. She found both the 2 ¼-inch and 35 mm formats frustrating and admitted to cropping her images and exaggerating angles. In her Running Legs series Model found a subject that provided her with a dynamic syncopated composition and allowed her to express the vitality and fragmentary nature of New York, a city that enthralled her. The angles from which she captured the truncated legs and feet of pedestrians varied from downward views, taken from a higher perspective, to upward shots, taken from subterranean vantage points.
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