Alice Austen, “Trude & I masked, short skirts” (August 6, 1891); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment (all photographs courtesy Historic Richmond City, until in any other case famous)
Clear Consolation, the house the place photographer Alice Austen grew up and lived for almost all of her life, was not one of many massive estates the rich constructed within the nineteenth century on Staten Island to get away from Manhattan. However its 11 cosy rooms, constructed round and atop an older one-room Dutch construction, and its huge inexperienced lawns main right down to the New York Harbor shore, offered house sufficient for a number of relations and a small family workers. It was the setting for many of her most interesting images as nicely. Saved from the wrecking ball by impassioned locals, in addition to cultural luminaries equivalent to photographer Berenice Abbott and theater producer Joseph Papp, the house is now a museum generally known as Alice Austen Home. In 2017, it grew to become the primary nationally designated web site of LGBTQ+ historical past, in no small half due to earlier protests led by the Lesbian Avengers insisting that the museum acknowledge Austen’s 50-plus 12 months relationship with Gertrude Tate. The house can also be a central character in Bonnie Yochelson’s new biography, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Pictures of Miss Alice Austen.
Although Yochelson doesn’t delve into it, Austen and her household might need most well-liked to remain largely sequestered inside their Staten Island house and the members-only social golf equipment they frequented as a result of the US of the late 1800s was riven by labor strikes, race riots, anti-immigrant sentiment, and a degree of sophistication inequality that has solely lately been exceeded. Whereas we don’t hear instantly from Austen on the politics of her time, Yochelson’s readability about her informal engagement with the racist and anti-immigrant tropes of her day, and telling particulars, equivalent to Austen paying for an inventory within the outdated cash listing, Social Register, current sufficient perception. In different phrases, Austen was no progressive lesbian hero. As an alternative her photographs supply tantalizing glimpses of intimacies amongst ladies at a time when solely a tiny variety of ladies had been behind the digicam, and even fewer provided something that may very well be described at present as a lesbian gaze.
Penny {photograph} of Alice Austen and Gertrude Tate (photograph courtesy Alice Austen Home)
The images Austen took from the Eighteen Eighties into the early 1900s are the first purpose we all know her at present, and Yochelson’s e-book doesn’t skimp on reproductions. They’re usually set throughout the partitions and greenery of Clear Consolation, towards its spectacular views of what was then an endlessly busy New York Harbor, or throughout the well-kept gathering locations of her echelon. These photographs, although posed (a necessity given the state of the expertise on the time), embrace humor and playfulness, and converse to her closeness to her topics, as in addition they display a rising mastery of the shape.
Alice Austen, “The Darned Club” (October 29, 1891); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
When Austen misplaced all of her inherited wealth within the 1929 inventory market crash, apart from the home and its contents, issues took a flip. Neither her household nor her earlier connections prevented her from dying in poverty, a gruellingly widespread destiny for LGBTQ+ ladies. By the mid-Forties, the 2 ladies had offered the whole lot they may, together with Austen’s photographic archive. Tate may now not handle Austen’s care, and they also left the home, with Austen ultimately declaring herself a pauper with a view to be admitted to New York’s Farm Colony.
Like far too many ladies artists, Austen was “discovered” at an extremely superior age. A 1951 LIFE journal profile helped convey her and her work to a nationwide viewers. But she died the next 12 months, along with her care and housing again in limbo. In line with Yochelson, the Staten Island Historic Society (now generally known as Historic Richmond City), which had acquired and held her photographic archive till simply this previous spring, withheld cash they owed her earlier than her dying.
It’s laborious to think about all of the adjustments Austen witnessed throughout her many years at Clear Consolation, however holding quick to that place and the vestiges of the world it represented are a part of what restricted her. The occasions by means of which she lived present occasional echoes of the world we discover ourselves in proper now, when the amassing of maximum wealth has radically altered our political panorama and the will to isolate and segregate are on the heart of the body. A ripe stress is on the core of her life — she needed to hunt her personal path from an early age and privately take pleasure in testing the boundaries of her gender, whereas additionally clinging to the privileges she assumed she would have entry to for the remainder of her life. This stress is extra of a subtext than a story in Yochelson’s e-book. Nonetheless, it factors to the the explanation why it’s not as unusual as folks may suppose for conservatism and queerness to coexist.
Alice Austen, “Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and self dressed up, sitting down” (October 15, 1891); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
Alice Austen and Gertrude Tate in 1944 (photograph courtesy Alice Austen Home)
Alice Austen, “Egg stand group” (April 18, 1895); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
Alice Austen, “Julia B. & self, Messrs Rawl, Ordway, Blunt, Buel, Gibson & Maurice” (February 20, 1892), Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
Alice Austen, “V. & C. Ward & self in bathing suits” (July 11, 1890); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
Alice Austen, “Self starting for Chicago Punch also” (July 1, 1893); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment
Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Pictures of Miss Alice Austen (2025) by Bonnie Yochelson is revealed by Fordham College Press and is offered on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
