Running Legs, New York

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.