Running Legs, made by Lisette Model on Fifth Avenue, Forty-Second Street, and other New York City streets principally in 1940-41, isolates pedestrians' moving legs to register the pace of metropolitan life.
Created soon after Model's 1938 emigration to New York, the series belongs to her early response to the city's streets, crowds, and commercial districts. By withholding faces and upper bodies, the photographs shift attention from individual identity toward movement, anonymity, and the accumulation of people in public space. Later scholars and curators have connected this fragmentation to the instability of urban experience and, in some readings, to Model's position as an émigré encountering Manhattan. The images avoid the city's monumental skyline, locating modernity instead in hurried gestures and passing bodies.
The monochrome photographs show shoes, heels, trouser legs, skirts, and cast shadows entering, crossing, or leaving tightly bounded frames. Model positioned the camera near ankle or ground level, while close cropping transforms pedestrians into overlapping shapes rather than conventional street portraits. Blur in several images conveys motion, and the narrow compositions imply activity continuing beyond their edges. These formal choices produce a cinematic rhythm that alternates between isolated walkers and dense clusters of legs, with a mood shaped by rush-hour compression and fleeting encounters.
Model used a Rolleiflex twin-lens-reflex camera with a waist-level finder and 6 × 6 centimeter negatives. Darkroom cropping was central to her method. Rather than preserve the square negative, she generally enlarged selected sections into vertical or horizontal compositions, sometimes producing multiple variants from the same image. Surviving examples are gelatin silver prints, and later printings demonstrate that she returned to the negatives over several decades.
Images associated with Running Legs appeared in the American photography press by 1941, including U.S. Camera, and the series was reported in Model's first American solo exhibition at New York's Photo League Gallery that year. A Fifth Avenue photograph later appeared in the February 1946 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The work entered retrospective exhibitions and publications devoted to Model, including National Gallery of Canada and Museum Ludwig projects, and was shown at Kunsthalle Wien and Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2000-01. More recent presentations include MoMA's Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection in 2014-15 and the Jewish Museum's Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine in 2021. Prints are held by institutions including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the International Center of Photography, and the National Gallery of Canada.
