With its panoramic views of New York Harbor, the home that trailblazing photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) referred to as house for many of her life, is a sprawling, two-story, elegant Victorian Gothic waterfront property referred to as Clear Consolation. Located on the Staten Island shoreline close to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, she would have witnessed the monumental meeting of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, and World Warfare I troopers coming back from the entrance—a lot of which she captured in additional than 7,000 unimaginable images all through her lifetime.
Austen’s physique of labor is taken into account among the many earliest and most prolific by a feminine photographer. Lengthy seen as an beginner as a result of she pursued the craft predominantly as a pastime, she is now acknowledged for her important contributions to the canon of American images. For a number of many years, her work has been stewarded by Historic Richmond City, previously the Staten Island Historic Society, the place greater than 7,500 prints and negatives had been entrusted in 1945. This month, all the archive returns to Clear Consolation—now referred to as the Alice Austen House—because of a landmark acquisition.
Rising up in New York, Austen found images when she was 10 years previous, changing her bed room closet right into a darkroom. “On this house studio, which was additionally certainly one of her photographic muses, she produced 1000’s of images of a quickly altering New York Metropolis, making important contributions to photographic historical past, documenting New York’s immigrant populations, Victorian ladies’s social actions, and the pure and architectural world of her travels,” says the museum.
Whereas she participated in Victorian society as a girl of wealth and privilege, Austen additionally flouted and mocked its customs and defied expectations of gender roles and domesticity. “Austen was a insurgent who broke away from the constraints of her Victorian atmosphere and solid an unbiased life that broke boundaries of acceptable feminine conduct and social guidelines,” the museum says. She usually lugged the cumbersome digital camera tools, weighing generally as much as 50 kilos, round on her bicycle.
Austen snapped humorous images of household and mates throughout leisurely actions round New York and on worldwide travels. She additionally centered on immigrants and dealing class folks in New York Metropolis, however her photographs primarily spotlight higher class type and pastimes, from tea time “larks” to swimming to hanging with the women—her relationships with different ladies proving influential in the kind of work she made and the way we learn it at present.
Marking a major web site in LGBTQ+ historical past, Clear Consolation was house for 30 years to each Austen and her life accomplice Gertrude Tate. Austen met the kindergarten and dance instructor in 1899, embarking on a relationship that might span greater than 5 many years. Whereas monetary difficulties on the finish of their lives pressured them to separate—Austen misplaced all of her wealth within the inventory market crash of 1929 and she or he and Tate had been evicted from Clear Consolation in 1945—Tate advocated for the preservation of Austen’s work. Their households denied the couple’s remaining needs to be buried collectively.
At the moment, Alice Austen Home is dedicated to showcasing the breadth of the seminal photographer’s work and highlighting her heretofore ignored but influential position in LGBTQ+ historical past. The group is a member of the Nationwide Belief for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program (previously) and is open to the general public Tuesday by Saturday.
Should you’re in Chicago, Austen’s work is included in The First Homosexuals: The Start of a New Id, 1869-1939 at Wrightwood 659 by July 26. The return of the archive to Austen’s ancestral house additionally aligns with the discharge of Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Pictures of Miss Alice Austen by Bonnie Yochelson. Discover your copy on Bookshop, and plan your go to to the Alice Austen Home on the museum’s website.
