Lisl Steiner

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.