Lisl Steiner

Lisl Steiner

November 28, 2017

Celebrating her 90th birthday: retrospective of an extraordinary photographic career.
The Vienna-born photographer, who now lives just outside New York, can look back on an extraordinary career. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday in the Blue Bar of Vienna’s legendary Hotel Sacher, while LFI pay tribute to her work with an excerpt from her multi-faceted oeuvre in the current magazine edition. Lisl Steiner is a gifted visual story-teller. Yet only a personal encounter can truly demonstrate why she likes to call herself ‘the Scheherazade of photography’ – which is also the subtitle of her monumental retrospective volume, ‘Lisl Baby’: “I am the Scheherazade of photography. Like Scheherazade, I have woven many stories from my life and photography into something like a coherent narrative of the times I found myself in. I’m a realist, for sure, but I also believe that part of what makes life beautiful are the surprises, the accidents. The unfolding of something that you couldn’t foresee until, at the end of your life, you say, ‘So this is what it was all about.’ The unknown has always stimulated me – has always driven me into situations that led me from one place to another; one experience to another, one person or place to another; the driving force behind the beauty of life. It’s being open yourself that allows you to be receptive to other people and their stories, and – in my case as a photographer – to what lies beneath a scenario that reveals a larger truth.”

Photography has always been at the centre of Lisl Steiner’s life. Armed with her Leica and her unique charm, she managed to capture the world’s most famous – and, at times, infamous – personalities in portraits that were at once sensitive and spontaneous. Yet to simply view her as a well-travelled photojournalist would not do justice to this remarkable artist’s personality: Lisl Steiner is also a collector, skilled draughtswoman, poet, muse, and even mature Youtube star with a wholly undulled sense of humour – a trait which the selected portraits and self portraits featured here are, in part, intended to convey.
ALL IMAGES ON THIS PAGE: © Lisl Steiner

Lisl Steiner+-

Born in Vienna on 19 November 1927. Emigrated to Buenos Aires together with her parents in 1938. Initially studied art and worked in the film industry, contributing to over 50 documentaries. After discovering her love for photography, she spent two years in Brazil. In 1960, she moved to New York, where she worked as a freelance photographer for publications such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and Life, as well as the Associated Press. In the early seventies, Steiner and her psychiatrist husband, Michael Meyer Monchek, moved to Pound Ridge, New York, where she still lives today.
The photographer has donated a considerable portion of her archive of drawings and photographs to the Austrian National Library in Vienna. More

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Lisl Steiner

Lisl Steiner