The Brooklyn Rail

If Alice Austen hadn’t suffered the misfortune of getting evicted in 1945—as noted by her biographer, independent art historian Bonnie Yochelson—then her life’s work of over seven thousand photographic prints and negatives may have vanished. The Staten Island Historical Society rescued the photographer’s archive that day, sensing that it contained important local history (realizing only years later that it was also full of artistic merit). If Austen’s trove hadn’t made it, then there wouldn’t have been a biography proposal for her in 1956, or a first biography published in 1976, or Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen—Yochelson’s recently published richly illustrated and heavily researched biography.

Austen’s story is worth telling, one that has attracted more attention recently (especially after the Alice Austen House, the same historic home that she was kicked out of, was designated a national site of LGBTQ history in 2017). A Victorian-era amateur photographer raised in an established Staten Island family, Austen focused her lens on the people and curiosities of her time, documenting her life as a lesbian long before the LGBTQ rights movement.

Told in easy-to-follow chronological order, Yochelson traces Austen’s biography back to her grandparents, among the earliest New Yorkers to establish Staten Island as a suburb in a harbor-facing house that was once part of a late-seventeenth-century farm. The family dubbed it “Clear Comfort” and when Austen was growing up it was a warm multigenerational home filled with her mother (who separated from her father), grandmother, aunt, two uncles, and servants. As the backdrop for many of her photos, Clear Comfort almost feels like a character in Austen’s life and is given significant attention in the biography.

“Alice Austen grew up in a house full of photographers and photographs,” Yochelson summarizes, describing how both her uncles were photographers, with her Uncle Oswald letting her play with his camera. Yochelson traces this love of the medium back to Austen’s grandfather, a photography collector who filled the house with prints. By the 1880s, photography was a daily occurrence at Clear Comfort, with a windowless closet on the second floor converted into a small darkroom.

This encouragement urged Austen to take a more serious approach to photography, and around 1885 she started numbering and annotating her negatives with dates, times, descriptions, and other details. One negative sleeve, for example, reads: “View from front door, tree & schooner (Fine clear day, some wind / 12:45 P.M. / Stop o / Instantaneous / Dalh lense / Monday Aug 8^th 1887.)” Since no diaries and very few letters by Austen survive, these texts are some of her only surviving written testimonials. They expose the professional-level effort that she put into her images, and provide clues about the identities of sitters and locations.

Austen’s earliest dated photo is a self-portrait from 1884 with the family dog, Punch, on her lap—she looks confidently into the camera while seated on a wicker chair in the garden. She also appeared in almost all her group portraits, which recorded her active social life. “In the 1880s, photographs were Alice’s social currency, garnering gratitude and praise from her family and friends. In the early 1890s, photography helped her assess and reject Victorian norms of femininity and marriage,” Yochelson writes, referring to some of the photographs for which Austen has become best known, such as Trude & I Masked, Short Skirts, August 6, 1891, showing her and a close friend who had recently gotten engaged (one of the ways the two can be told apart here is that she’s wearing an engagement ring). Posing as prostitutes in their undergarments, in a way that would have been jarring during their Victorian era, the young women pretend to smoke cigarettes.

By the mid-1890s, Austen ventured past Staten Island and took a two-week trip to photograph the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a treat since she was fascinated with mechanical innovations. She also created a “Street Types of New York” portfolio, traveling to different parts of Manhattan to photograph laborers such as peddlers, bootblacks, newsboys, and street cleaners. Then she settled into domestic life with Gertrude Tate, and her photography shifted again.

Tate was Austen’s longtime partner as of 1899, and when they began vacationing annually together around 1903, she switched from glass negatives to the more convenient film negatives. This allowed Austen to be more experimental as they traveled across Europe and Morocco, but since film negatives were harder to process and expensive to develop and print commercially, she often just didn’t. Her archive of over seven thousand prints and negatives includes around three thousand film negatives, but Austen only printed a few of these in her lifetime. This biography reproduces several of the film negative travel photos, and over one hundred of Austen’s photographs in general from her early “larky” days to her later years.

Yochelson’s reappraisal corrects errors in the previous biography by Ann Novotny, Alice’s World: The Life and Photography of an American Original: Alice Austen, 1866–1952 (1976), questioning assertions from people who had known Austen which Novotny took at face value. This includes the discovery that Alice’s father didn’t go back to his native England after her birth but (perhaps complicating matters) lived with his parents in Brooklyn when he was estranged from his wife and daughter. Novotny’s biography also problematically described Austen’s relationship with Gertrude as a companionship, instead of noting they were lovers. And Austen did not begin photographing at age ten, as Novotny claimed; Yochelson corrects the timeline and notes that she began as a teenager.

Yochelson also includes an epilogue in which she does a service to Austen’s close women friends who didn’t have something like photography to ensure their stories were told. The epilogue provides brief biographies of these women, the recurring cast of characters for Austen’s photographs whose lives extended far beyond the lasting images.