thumb|Alice Austen House or Clear Comfort in 2002|alt=A two-story, white, Dutch Colonial-style house with three dormer windows and shrubbery obscuring the front porch columns.

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Elizabeth Alice Austen (March 17, 1866 &ndash; June 9, 1952) was an American photographer working in Staten Island. She is best known for her street photography and her intimate depictions of women's lives and relationships in the Victorian era.

Biography

Alice Austen was born Elizabeth Alice Austen on March 17, 1866, in Rosebank, New York to Alice Cornell Austen and Edward Stopford Munn. Her great-great-grandfather, Peter Townsend, was the owner of Sterling Iron Works famous for forging the Hudson River Chain used to thwart British ships during the American Revolutionary War. Austen's father abandoned the family around 1869, prompting Austen and her mother to move to her family's Victorian Gothic farmhouse, nicknamed Clear Comfort, where they lived with Austen's maternal grandparents, her uncle, and her aunt and her husband. She was encouraged at a young age to pursue various activities and hobbies, and was first introduced to photography at the age of ten by her uncle Oswald.

Photography

Austen was a self-taught photographer, and primarily used photographic plates and a camera manufactured by the Scovill Company. She also meticulously recorded information about her photographs, including the glass plate brand, aperture, and exposure time. Austen used a darkroom, likely designed by her uncle, an amateur photographer and chemistry professor at Rutgers University, and produced over 7,000 photographs up through the 1930s, most notably depicting New York's immigrant populations, the inner lives and activities of Victorian women, and her travels to Europe. Austen is considered an amateur photographer as she was independently wealthy and typically did not sell her work to support herself.

Her work was also published in Violet Ward's Bicycling for Ladies in 1896, although she was not credited. The majority of her work was intended for private viewing, as they depicted intimate relationships between Victorian women and scenes from a non-traditional lifestyle, which included smoking, cross-dressing, and biking. In June 2025, Historic Richmond Town Repatriates Alice Austen’s Photographic Archive to the Alice Austen House After More Than 80 Years.

Relationships and later life

thumb|Alice Austen's gravestone in [[Moravian Cemetery. |alt=A headstone reading "E. Alice Austen, Photographer, March 17, 1866, June 9, 1952. There are blue and purple flowers with a purple bow beside it.]]

In 1897, Austen met Gertrude Tate, a teacher from Brooklyn, while on vacation in the Catskills. In 1929, Austen lost her savings in the Wall Street crash, and she and Tate financially struggled throughout the Great Depression. The two women worked to support themselves, with Tate offering dance classes and the brief establishment of a tea room in their home.

In 1951, historian and former LIFE magazine writer Oliver Jensen discovered her photographs, which had been transferred to the Staten Island Historical Society. Playwright Robin Rice's drama Alice in Black and White traces Austen's life from 1876 to 1951. The play also follows Oliver Jensen's search for and discovery of Austen and her glass plate negatives. The play first premiered at the Kentucky Center in 2013, and then at 59E59 Theaters in New York City in 2016, the 150th anniversary of Austen's birth. The play also received the StageWrite Women's Theatre Initiative Award at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2022, a podcast created by scholar Pamela Bannos in collaboration with the Alice Austen House Museum, titled My Dear Alice, was released, featuring excerpts from Austen's correspondence with various friends and family.

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File:Street types of New York City- Emigrant and pretzel vendor LCCN2002699108.jpg|Street types of New York City-Emigrant and pretzel vendor

File:Street types of New York City- Messenger boy and bike LCCN2002699100.jpg|Street Types of New York City-Messenger boy and bike

File:New York City, 1897. The organ grinder and his wife LCCN2013646372.jpg|New York City, 1897. The organ grinder and his wife

File:Street types of New York City- Street cleaner with pick ax standing in front of pile of snow LCCN2002699104.jpg|Street types of New York City-Street cleaner with pick ax standing in front of pile of snow

File:Quarantine station, Hoffman Island, NYC- group of immigrants amid buildings LCCN2016647961.jpg|Quarantine station, Hoffman island, NYC-group of immigrants amid buildings

File:Immigrants from a smallpox ship, held in custody for observation, behind wire fence, Hoffman Island, N.Y. LCCN2006690316.tif|Immigrants from a smallpox ship, held in custody for observation, behind wire fence, Hoffman Island, N.Y.

File:Ladies' Home Journal Vol.11 No.09 (August, 1894).pdf|Ladies' Home Journal Vol. 11 No. 09 (August, 1894)

File:New York City- Street sweeper and handcart LCCN2005680938.jpg|New York City Street sweeper and handcart

File:Street types of New York City- Policeman, standing, full lgth, facing left LCCN2002699106.jpg|Street types of New York City-Policeman, standing full length facing left

File:Street types of New York City- 2 rag carts LCCN2002699107.tif|Street types of New York City-2 rag carts

File:Street types of New York City- Postman at letter box LCCN2002699105.tif|Street types of New York City-Postman at letter box

File:Alice Austen, Trude & I Masked.jpg|alt=A black and white photograph of two women, both wearing white knee-length dresses, black tights, black shoes, and white Venetian masks covering their eyes and nose. The women have cigarettes in their mouths and are holding the tips to each other. |Alice Austen and Trude Eccleston.

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References

Further reading

  • Austen, Alice: Street Types of New York. New York: The Albertype Company, 1896; facsimile reprint, Staten Island, N.Y; Friends of Alice Austen House, 1994
  • New York Times, October 6, 1951, page 12; "Alice Austen Day"

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  • ‘The Newly Discovered Picture World of Alice Austen: Great Woman Photographer Steps Out of the Past’, Life (24 Sept 1951), pp.&nbsp;137–44
  • Gerhard Bissell, Austen, Alice, in: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (Artists of the World), Suppl. I, Saur, Munich 2005, p.&nbsp;541 (in German).
  • Buckwalter, Margaret: Alice Austen: Commemorative Journal: Alice Austen Museum, 1986
  • Grover, C. Jane: The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn-of-the-Century America: State University of New York Press, 1988.
  • Hammer, Barbara: The Female Closet (A look at the art and lives of Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman) Video, 1998
  • Humphreys, Hugh Campbell: Gateway to America: The Alice Austen House and Esplanade. New York: Friends of The Alice Austen House, 1968 (A proposal to restore and preserve the Alice Austen house and former New York Yacht Club on Staten Island, and to create a park and a museum)
  • H. Humphries and R. Benedict: ‘The Friends of Alice Austen: With a Portfolio of Historical Photographs’, Infinity (July 1967), pp.&nbsp;4–31
  • Jensen, Oliver: The Revolt of American Women; a Pictorial History of the Century of Change from Bloomers to Bikinis-from Feminism to Freud: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
  • Kaplan, Daile: Fine Day: The Exhibition Featuring Photographs By Alice Austen Frank Eugene Gertrude Kasebier and Others: Alice Austen House & Staten Island Historical Society, 1988 (exhibition catalog)
  • Khoudari, Amy S.; Alice Austen House: A National Historic Landmark, Museum & Garden Guide. Staten Island: Friends of Alice Austen House, c1993
  • S. Khoudari: Looking the Shadows: The Life and Photography of Alice Austen (diss., New York, Sarah Lawrence College, 1993)
  • M. Kreisel: American Women Photographers: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography (Westport and London, 1999)
  • Lenman, Robin: The Oxford Companion to Photography: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Lynch, Annette and Katalin Medvedev (editors): Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment: Performing Agency, Following Script: London/New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
  • Novotny, Ann. Alice's World: The Life and Photography of an American Original: Alice Austen, 1866-1952. Old Greenwich, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1976.
  • Novotny, Ann. "Alice Austen's World." In Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 1, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 27–33.
  • Rist, Darrell Yates. "Alice Austen House: A Gay Haven on Staten Island is Reclaimed." The Advocate, no. 438 (21 January 1986): 38–39.
  • J. L. Roscio: Unpacking a Victorian Woman: Alice Austen and Photography of the Cult of Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America (diss., Buffalo, NY, State U., 2005)
  • Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville, 2014. .
  • Simpson, Jeffrey: The Way Life Was. A Photographic Treasury from the American Past by Chansonetta Emmons, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Alice Austen, Jacob Riis, The Byrons, Lewis Hine, Henry Hamilton Bennett, Solomon Butcher, L.W. Halbe, Joseph Pennell, E.J. Bellocq, Erwin Smith, Adam Vroman, Edward Curtis, Arnold Genthe and Darius Kinsey: New York/Washington Chanticleer Press/Praeger, 1975
  • Wexler, Laura: Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000,
  • Woods, Mary N.: Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
  • Zimmerman, Bonnie (editor): Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1: New York/London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2000.
  • Official Alice Austen Website
  • Selected Austen images in the Staten Island Historical Society Online Collections Database
  • Alice Austen Recognized as LGBTQ Icon
  • Alice Austen House NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
  • Clear Comfort National Park Service
  • Whitney Museum of American Art Panel Discussion: Alice Austen House: New Eyes on Alice Austen