Hubert's Freak Museum and Flea Circus, Forty-second Street, New York, ca. 1945
Gelatin silver print
34.3 x 26.8 cm (13-1/2 x lO-9/16 in.)
84.XP.124.20

"I am not a visual person," Model once remarked enigmatically to a student, while to another she said: "Never take a picture of anything you are not passion- ately interested in." Inner conflict and outer contradiction were essential to Model, and it was her relentless probing of social realities-human foibles, peoples' senseless sufferings, and their profound eccentricities-that formed the affective ingredient in her art. Here two cross-dressed men are seen in the context of an amusement center in New York's tenderloin district, called "Hubert's Freak Museum and Flea Circus." Behavior that Freud had analyzed twenty years before was, in 1945, still generally considered as only appropriate for public display in a "Freak Museum."