Most of Alice Austen’s life was full of adventure and opportunity; her thoughts on Victorian society and experience as a privileged LGBTQ woman paved the way for a more liberal future society. Alice obtained her first camera at age five from her uncle Oswald Muller – a Danish sea captain who brought the camera over from one of his journeys overseas. She was a curious only child; the world was new and exciting to her. With all the attention on her, it made sense for her to use the gadget to record all the beauty and curiosities that surrounded her. Photography was an odd hobby for a young woman of that period, especially one from such a sheltered and comfortable economic background. The Austen’s, an affluent family of Staten Island, lived in an old house overlooking the water called “Clear Comfort”. When Alice first started exploring with photography, her most common subjects would be of her family as well as her home. Her aunts and uncles would pose for Alice from the driveway to the water’s edge. It was strange for a proper young lady to lug around cumbersome camera equipment, such as tripods and boxes of heavy glass plates, but the idea of travel excited Alice and was often a theme of her work. She captured the concept of exploration figuratively and literally. Her staged photographs portrayed the idea of escaping the social normalities of the era- time traveling. She also photographed the struggles of immigrant workers and child laborers in order to educate herself. In response, she also wanted the people who lived the “larky life” to understand the hardships of the less fortunate. There was such a divide in social class that it was like studying a wild species in their natural habitat for Alice. This further suggests her fascination with another type of life: one of purpose, freedom, struggle, and vibrancy.
She captured social history on her plates through her adventures. In 1892, she went on and recorded a ten day trip in a ketch from New Brunswick, NJ, down the canals and across the Chesapeake to Annapolis, MD. She loved to capture her “larky life” which encompassed a carefree way of living. Sunbathing parties on summer afternoons, as well as bowling parties and gymnastics classes with her friends, were all captured by her lens. In her youth, Staten Island was the first American home for tennis, for which the neophyte developed great insight. She was the youngest amateur woman tennis player of her generation. Eventually, her family decided to invest in a small tennis court for the lawn of “Clear Comfort,” on which she often photographed the assembly of all her friends, tennis racquets in hand. While that meant hauling her camera and tripod to picnics, masquerades, and musical evenings with friends- Alice didn’t seem bothered. Her friends were delighted to partake in the fun of Alice’s experimental or routine shoots. Sometimes they clowned for the camera, pretending to be wildly intoxicated on dry beverages, or scandalous women smoking faux cigarettes (in an era when women were arrested for smoking in public) and revealing their ankles. Alice and three of her friends even made up a group called the “Darned Club,” which specifically excluded men from their lives. The members often photographed tabooed female scenes, such as cross-dressing, holding an umbrella between one’s legs, and smoking cigarettes.
Alice Austen also liked to capture the various elements of changing times. For example, she photographed women riding bikes, the first socially acceptable physical activity for females. She also took pictures of typical environments, such as African American children in Sunday dress at a Methodist church, a blacksmith shop, and Midland beach replete with summer swimmers.
Austen’s location also played a significant role in her work. Alice had an amazing view of passenger ships that were on their way to the quarantine stations for immigrants. Therefore, she was able to record the greatest mass migration of humans in history. She captured crew members of ship Cyrene being disinfected and documented quarantine procedures, such as the steam sanitizing chambers of Hoffman Island that sterilized clothes and bedding. However, her photography was anything but restricted to Staten Island. Alice carried her camera to streets of Manhattan, photographing newcomers and older residents as they went on with their business. Towards the end of her career, she had compiled a broad portfolio of stereotypes through documentation of street sweepers and snow cleaners, rag pickers and peddlers who sold anything from oranges to shoe strings and suspenders. She recorded newsboys and girls so poor that they wore no shoes and Russian and Polish Jewish women who sold chickens, eggs, and vegetables, in open-air markets. Her subjects don’t look poverty-stricken or downtrodden; they look directly at her camera, with a sense of self-conscious pride or curiosity. The people in Alice’s photographs appear to share her joy for life, no matter how dreary it may get.
We chose to convey her interest in realism and youthfulness through the recreation of a potential photo album from Alice’s collection, replete with possible photos that she would have staged, or randomly captured. We wanted to highlight her desire to capture the unconventional, aspects of New York life, as well as the pleasant and expected. We believe this style stemmed from her deep-rooted desire for masculinity, freedom, and purpose in a world catered to men.
In the creation of the album, we laser cut a piece of dark brown scrap leather. Photo albums at the time were notorious for their elaborately engraved leather faces and lined bindings. We highlighted the engravings with an ink pen to better portray the similarity of the design to a similar frame from her childhood home at “Clear Comfort” (Alice Austen House). To fill the album, we selected 21 photos that best captured Alice’s aesthetic and that would touch upon all of her types of work. Such as her early years of photographing family, friends, and “Clear Comfort.” Images include her family, her “larky” life, workers on the streets of New York, as well as immigrant quarantine procedures on Hoffman Island.
The pictures of our album are all 4 x 5 inches to reflect the size of the images taken by Alice’s traveling camera. Since proper exposure depended on successful guessing at the degree of light on the subject, Alice learned to shoot in slight shade or overcast weather. We captured this technique in her photo album, by selecting an overexposed image of a paper man. Another technical limitation of Austen’s camera was its inability to freeze a moment of action, creating frustrating blurs. This is portrayed in the album through the presence of images of stationary “moving” female cyclists.
The object we created showcases the development of her work and character. The book lacks an enclosure for privacy because she didn’t care much for secrecy. The iconoclast was bold. Alice’s work was forcibly hidden in history because of the conservative society she was living in, except for the final year of her life when her work fell into the hands of a Life, magazine editor. The images that she took showed that she wasn’t a secretive individual; she was merely a public artist without an audience. The genuity in every image suggests her true intentions: capturing memories.
We placed an image of Alice in the front cover sleeve, next to the dedication, to personalize the possession. The blurb written in the front cover of her album writes: “To the pleasantries of ‘Clear Comfort,’ my opportunities in life, and the experiences that led to my eternal fullness with my best friend, Gertrude Tate.” We further portray Alice’s structured manner through the layout of her pages, all having been dated and captioned beneath the image that provides information on the place and context of the photograph. Furthermore, the pages have been constructed to roll out into a roll of film, to reflect an object of familiarity from Alice’s life, and designed via Photoshop to capture the “tainted effect” of an album from the 1900s without damaging the images. Lastly, to add to this aged and cherished aesthetic, we chose to leave the leather edges of the work unrefined.
Her work was her most cherished personal possessions because her memories were priceless. Our intentions for this project were to portray a diary, something a woman admires for years to come for self-reflection of personal development, rather than a professional portfolio. We desired to create an object that Alice would have swept through merely to conjure the feelings of her excitement and youth that were expressed in the moment of every snapshot.
Bibliography
“Alice Austen House.” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Accessed November 29, 2018.
“Alice Austen House.” Olana State Historic Site | Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios. Accessed November 29, 2018.
Gover, C. Jane. The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
“Her Life | Alice Austen House.” Welcome to the Alice Austen House. Accessed November 29, 2018.
Jow, Tiffany. “This Pioneering Photographer Captured Same-Sex Love Over a Century Ago.” 11 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy. July 20, 2017. Accessed November 29, 2018.
“National Trust for Historic Preservation: Return to Home Page.” National Trust Membership Benefits and Giving Levels | National Trust for Historic Preservation. August 01, 2018. Accessed November 29, 2018.
Novotny, Ann, and Alice Austen. Alice’s World: The Life and Photography of an American Original, Alice Austen, 1866-1952. Old Greenwich, CT: Chatham Press, 1976.
O’Hara, Amy. Personal Interview. 14 Nov. 2018.
“Rediscovering Alice Austen: A New Woman for a Modern World.” American Photo. Accessed November 29, 2018.
Twardowski, Kristen. “Reading Alice Austen, Lesbian Photographer.” BOOK RIOT. March 14, 2018. Accessed November 29, 2018.
