Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen

Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen
Bonnie Yochelson
Fordham University Press, Empire State Editions, 2025

If Alice Austen hadn’t suffered the misfortune of getting evicted in 1945—as famous by her biographer, unbiased artwork historian Bonnie Yochelson—then her life’s work of over seven thousand photographic prints and negatives could have vanished. The Staten Island Historical Society rescued the photographer’s archive that day, sensing that it contained necessary native historical past (realizing solely years later that it was additionally filled with creative advantage). If Austen’s trove hadn’t made it, then there wouldn’t have been a biography proposal for her in 1956, or a primary biography printed in 1976, or Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen—Yochelson’s not too long ago printed richly illustrated and closely researched biography.

Austen’s story is price telling, one which has attracted extra consideration not too long ago (particularly after the Alice Austen House, the identical historic residence that she was kicked out of, was designated a nationwide web site of LGBTQ historical past in 2017). A Victorian-era novice photographer raised in a longtime Staten Island household, Austen centered her lens on the folks and curiosities of her time, documenting her life as a lesbian lengthy earlier than the LGBTQ rights motion.

Told in easy-to-follow chronological order, Yochelson traces Austen’s biography again to her grandparents, among the many earliest New Yorkers to ascertain Staten Island as a suburb in a harbor-facing home that was as soon as a part of a late-seventeenth-century farm. The household dubbed it “Clear Comfort” and when Austen was rising up it was a heat multigenerational residence crammed along with her mom (who separated from her father), grandmother, aunt, two uncles, and servants. As the backdrop for a lot of of her pictures, Clear Comfort virtually looks like a personality in Austen’s life and is given important consideration within the biography.

“Alice Austen grew up in a house full of photographers and photographs,” Yochelson summarizes, describing how each her uncles have been photographers, along with her Uncle Oswald letting her play along with his digicam. Yochelson traces this love of the medium again to Austen’s grandfather, a images collector who crammed the home with prints. By the Eighties, images was a each day incidence at Clear Comfort, with a windowless closet on the second ground transformed right into a small darkroom.

This encouragement urged Austen to take a extra severe strategy to images, and round 1885 she began numbering and annotating her negatives with dates, occasions, descriptions, and different particulars. One unfavourable sleeve, for instance, reads: “View from front door, tree & schooner (Fine clear day, some wind / 12:45 P.M. / Stop o / Instantaneous / Dalh lense / Monday Aug 8^th 1887.)” Since no diaries and only a few letters by Austen survive, these texts are a few of her solely surviving written testimonials. They expose the professional-level effort that she put into her pictures, and supply clues concerning the identities of sitters and places.

Austen’s earliest dated picture is a self-portrait from 1884 with the household canine, Punch, on her lap—she seems confidently into the digicam whereas seated on a wicker chair within the backyard. She additionally appeared in virtually all her group portraits, which recorded her lively social life. “In the 1880s, photographs were Alice’s social currency, garnering gratitude and praise from her family and friends. In the early 1890s, photography helped her assess and reject Victorian norms of femininity and marriage,” Yochelson writes, referring to a few of the images for which Austen has turn into greatest identified, resembling Trude & I Masked, Short Skirts, August 6, 1891, exhibiting her and an in depth good friend who had not too long ago gotten engaged (one of many methods the 2 might be advised aside right here is that she’s sporting an engagement ring). Posing as prostitutes of their undergarments, in a manner that might have been jarring throughout their Victorian period, the younger girls faux to smoke cigarettes.