Lisette and Evsa Model arrived in New York from Le Havre in France on 1 October, 1938. Their initial intention was simply to travel, but they decided to emigrate and remain permanently in the metropolis. Applying for a permanent visa, the couple travelled in December 1938 to Cuba for re-entering the U.S. It was a common way and also the émigrés Walter Sanders and Fritz Henle took the passage via Cuba and Mexiko the application of a permanent visa. Trained as a musician and singer, Lisette taught herself photography after her family moved from Vienna to Nice in 1926. In order to hide their Jewish roots, the family had already changed their name from Stern to Seybert. While living in Paris, Lisette made contact with other émigré photographers such as Florence Henri (1893–1982) and Rogi André (1900–1970). She and Florence Henri, with the help of Lisette's sister Olga Model, sought advice on photographing with a Rolleiflex camera. No information is available on whether Olga had already trained in photography in Vienna, or whether she had worked as a professional photographer or what direction her life took. However, on trips from her apartment in Paris to the apartment of her mother in Nice, Lisette encountered street life in the south of France and captured it with her camera. During the 1930s her first series Promenades des Anglais focused on bourgeois life on this famous street on the Côte d’Azur. The photographs were very direct and captured revealing and unexpected moments in everyday street life. Some of the images in Promenades des Anglais were taken the same year she departed for New York. On her arrival in New York in 1938, this series was her entry point to the photographic scene and to a career in the metropolis. During the 1940s it was presented in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (see below) and printed in such international magazines as the British Lilliput and the American PM magazines.

Model set about discovering her new city on foot and, shortly after her arrival to New York, created two series with her Rolleiflex camera. For Window Reflections, she photographed urban shop windows in a modernist aesthetic. The photographs were taken either inside or outside the shop windows and reflected the comings and goings of passers-by as well as the architecture of the skyscrapers and the displays in the shop windows. The result is a multilayered picture in which the window displays and the street scenes reflect and represent the complex urban life that surrounded her. Another émigré, the photographer T. Lux Feininger, was also inspired by window reflections for some of his photographs and drawings.
This experimental and creative way of seeing, and the urban impressions of New York, can also be seen in Lisette Model's second series, Running Legs. These close-up pictures focus on passers-by but, instead of a full portrait, consist only of running legs. We see high-heeled shoes and the shoes of businessmen as groups and individuals head as fast as possible on their way. The momentum is also captured in the blurred and fuzzy photographic technique. This series of photographs has a cinematographic rhythm and gestures to the anonymous and crowded life of the metropolis, expressing Model’s own anxieties about New York urban life. In this context, it is interesting to remember that Model used a Rolleiflex camera, which was worn hanging in front of the upper body, with the view-finder at the top of the camera. This suggests that Model must have been a very physically agile photographer, well able to cope with all the stooping and bending that was required. Interestingly, some years earlier, the émigré photographer Rudy Burckhardt operated in the same way, using cropped images of passers-by for his New York N. Why album. In 1941 one image of Running Legs was published under the auspices of art director Alexey Brodovitch in Harper’s Bazaar magazine, for which the photographer Hermann Landshoff also worked, and in the same year for U.S. Camera.  In 1948, Landshoff made a portrait series of Lisette Model that includes a photograph in which she wears a miniature camera round her neck. In addition to her Rolleiflex, Model also used this model of camera. It seems likely that the two photographers knew each other through their work at Harper's Bazaar. Model's series of Running Legs was also featured in an article by the art critic Elizabeth McCausland in Minicam magazine in 1941 (McCausland 1941). Other series produced by Lisette Model included one on Coney Island and another on Sammy’s Bowery Follies, a bar on the Lower East Side which was also the subject of a series by the émigré photographer Erika Stone.

On their arrival in New York in 1938, Lisette Model and her husband, the Russian-born painter Evsa Model, lived at 130 Riverside Drive. The Austrian émigré photographer Lilly Joss Reich also lived in the vicinity. Lisette Model (née as Seybert), as she then was, married the Russian Jewish painter Evsa Model in Paris in 1937 and would spend the rest of her life with him. As in the work of his wife, Evsa's paintings reflected urban life in the metropolis, creating their own visual language: on the one hand, the geometries, architecture and colourfulness of the metropolis; on the other hand, the anonymity of individuals in the big city. In 1943 the couple move to 55 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, an area that during the 1940s was home to many artists and photographers. The photographer Berenice Abbot lived in the borough, as did émigré photographers Rolf Tietgens and T. Lux Feininger, and Valeska Gert’s Beggar Bar was located near the Models' apartment. As early as 1941, Lisette Model had photographed Valeska Gert, the German émigré artist and dancer, and the two women had become friends.

Other images testify that Lisette and Evsa Model’s apartment at 55 Grove Street, as well as their later apartment at 137 7th Avenue, was designed and painted by them in black, green, red and yellow, after the style of the Russian constructs and Piet Mondrian (Le Pommeré 2019) . From 1958 until Lisette Model’s death in 1968, the couple lived in a basement apartment at 137 7th Avenue. Although it had no daylight, the couple started photographic and painting courses in one of the rooms. Not far from the apartment was the New School for Social Research and from 1951 Lisette Model gave courses on photography there, filling Berenice Abbot’s former position. In her courses on “The Small Camera in Photography today” and “Photographing New York and its People” she shared her knowledge and practical experience with miniature cameras, as well as her knowledge of the urban New York landscape, directly with her students. Other émigrés offering photography and photojournalism courses were Josef Breitenbach, Charles Leirens, Marion Palfi, Kurt Safranski, Alexey Brodovitch and Tim Gidal. The émigrés Fred Stein and Werner Wolff also frequented the New School, working as commission for the Black Star photo agency. The German émigré Erika Stone was a student of Berenice Abbot at the New School.

During the 1940s and 1950s Lisette Model’s work was shown at several locations in New York. Her first solo show was at the Photo League Gallery in 1941. The Photo League was a cooperation of professional and amateur photographers of which Model was a member. Other émigré photographers who were either members or had dealings with the Photo League included Rudy Burkhardt, Rolf Tietgens, Fred Stein and Hermann Landshoff.
Lisette Model’s first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art took place in 1940 and was followed by more than 20 more, until her death in 1968. A retrospective of her work was held in 1983. In 1940, she participated in the Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics exhibition. Lisette Model’s image was a photograph of a women in Nice, taken in 1938. It was hung next to a photograph by Walker Evans. Among the French photographers taking part were Henri Cartier Bresson and Eugène Atget. American photographers taking part included Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams , Berenice Abbot, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Helen Levit, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston. Other émigré photographers were Ruth Bernhard and László Moholy-Nagy. In 1943 Model took part in the Action Photography exhibition. Besides Model, works by the émigré photographers Andreas Feininger, Hebert Matter, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Thomas Bouchard were also presented. The same year, Model participated in the Portraits exhibition, showing a portrait from her time in France. Two portraits by Lotte Jacobi, of Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, were also shown in the exhibition. In 1944 three works by Lisette Model were shown at the Art In Progress. 15th Anniversary exhibition. Other émigré photographers represented were Josef Breitenbach, Andreas Feininger and László Moholy-Nagy70 Photographers Look At New York City: from 1853 to 1957 was the title of an exhibition shown in 1957, where five images by Lisette Model were presented alongside works by other émigrés photographers including Robert Frank, Andreas Feininger and Lisa Larsen (née Rothschild).

Lisette Model’s work was an important contribution to the photographic urban aesthetics of photography during the 1930s and 1940s and gained a high reputation among both émigré and American colleagues. This can also be seen in the fact that she was invited to take part in the “What Is Modern Photography?” symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950. This was part of a panel series launched by the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s and 1950s. Other subjects covered were: “What Is Modern Architecture?”, “What Is Modern Painting?”, “What Is Modern Sculpture?” and “What Is Modern Design?”.