TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED

Alice’s world.

Yochelson, former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, pays homage to photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), who, like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, documented a changing America. Born Elizabeth Alice Austen Munn, she grew up at Clear Comfort, her family’s estate on Staten Island, now a public museum and, since 2015, designated an LGBTQ+ landmark. Although her parents separated, Alice grew up in wealth and privilege, indulging in her passion for lawn tennis and, in the mid-1880s, taking up photography, including developing her own prints. Her subjects were family, friends, and suitors; travels near and far; nature and urban scenes. Not interested in selling her work, she often gave framed prints as gifts. Generously illustrated, the biography reveals a change in her perspective in 1891 when she began to use her camera to satirize social rituals and gender politics—posing herself and friends dressed in men’s clothes, for example. In 1893, she traveled to Chicago, the farthest she had ever been from home, to photograph buildings and exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In Manhattan, she documented tradespeople and immigrants she called “street types.” Claiming she was “too good to get married,” Austen found a lifelong companion in Gertrude Tate, whom she met in 1897. They traveled together but did not live together until 1917. Financial troubles dogged their later years: Austen lost all her money in the stock market crash of 1929, and even selling her possessions could not prevent the pair from being eventually evicted from Clear Comfort. Yochelson traces the fraught process by which Austen’s photo collection was rescued by the Staten Island Historical Society, as well as a posthumous controversy over her sexuality.

A sensitive portrait of a prolific photographer.