Alice Austen, “Trude & I masked, short skirts” (August 6, 1891); Assortment of Historic Richmond City, Alice Austen {Photograph} Assortment (all photos 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 vast inexperienced lawns main right down to the New York Harbor shore, supplied area sufficient for a number of relations and a small family employees. It was the setting for many of her best pictures as properly. Saved from the wrecking ball by impassioned locals, in addition to cultural luminaries similar to photographer Berenice Abbott and theater producer Joseph Papp, the house is now a museum referred to as Alice Austen Home. In 2017, it turned the primary nationally designated website 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 be a central character in Bonnie Yochelson’s new biography, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Images of Miss Alice Austen.
Although Yochelson doesn’t delve into it, Austen and her household may 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 america of the late 1800s was riven by labor strikes, race riots, anti-immigrant sentiment, and a stage of sophistication inequality that has solely lately been exceeded. Whereas we don’t hear straight 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racist and anti-immigrant tropes of her day, and telling particulars, similar to Austen paying for a list within the outdated cash listing, Social Register, current sufficient perception. In different phrases, Austen was no progressive lesbian hero. As an alternative her photos supply tantalizing glimpses of intimacies amongst girls at a time when solely a tiny variety of girls have been behind the digital camera, and even fewer provided something that may very well be described at the moment as a lesbian gaze.
Penny {photograph} of Alice Austen and Gertrude Tate (photograph courtesy Alice Austen Home)
The pictures Austen took from the Eighties into the early 1900s are the first cause we all know her at the moment, and Yochelson’s e-book doesn’t skimp on reproductions. They’re typically set throughout the partitions and greenery of Clear Consolation, in opposition to its spectacular views of what was then an endlessly busy New York Harbor, or throughout the well-kept gathering locations of her echelon. These photos, although posed (a necessity given the state of the expertise on the time), embrace humor and playfulness, and communicate to her closeness to her topics, as additionally 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, aside 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+ girls. By the mid-Forties, the 2 girls had offered the whole lot they might, together with Austen’s photographic archive. Tate may now not handle Austen’s care, and they also left the home, with Austen finally declaring herself a pauper as a way 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, together with her care and housing again in limbo. Based on Yochelson, the Staten Island Historic Society (now referred to 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 demise.
It’s exhausting 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 which she lived present occasional echoes of the world we discover ourselves in proper now, when the amassing of utmost wealth has radically altered our political panorama and the will to isolate and segregate are on the heart of the body. A ripe rigidity is on the core of her life — she needed to hunt her personal path from an early age and privately get pleasure from 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 rigidity is extra of a subtext than a story in Yochelson’s e-book. Nevertheless, it factors to the the reason why it’s not as unusual as individuals 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 Images of Miss Alice Austen (2025) by Bonnie Yochelson is printed by Fordham College Press and is accessible on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
