With its panoramic views of New York Harbor, the home that trailblazing photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) known as dwelling for many of her life, is a sprawling, two-story, elegant Victorian Gothic waterfront property generally known 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 Battle I troopers getting back from the entrance—a lot of which she captured in additional than 7,000 unbelievable 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 vital contributions to the canon of American pictures. For a number of a long time, her work has been stewarded by Historic Richmond City, previously the Staten Island Historic Society, the place greater than 7,500 prints and negatives have been entrusted in 1945. This month, your complete archive returns to Clear Consolation—now generally known as the Alice Austen Home—because of a landmark acquisition.
Rising up in New York, Austen found pictures when she was 10 years previous, changing her bed room closet right into a darkroom. “In this home studio, which was also one of her photographic muses, she produced thousands of photographs of a rapidly changing New York City, making significant contributions to photographic history, documenting New York’s immigrant populations, Victorian women’s social activities, and the natural and architectural world of her travels,” says the museum.
Whereas she participated in Victorian society as a lady of wealth and privilege, Austen additionally flouted and mocked its customs and defied expectations of gender roles and domesticity. “Austen was a rebel who broke away from the constraints of her Victorian environment and forged an independent life that broke boundaries of acceptable female behavior and social rules,” the museum says. She usually lugged the cumbersome digital camera tools, weighing typically as much as 50 kilos, round on her bicycle.
Austen snapped humorous images of household and buddies throughout leisurely actions round New York and on worldwide travels. She additionally targeted on immigrants and dealing class folks in New York Metropolis, however her pictures primarily spotlight higher class type and pastimes, from tea time “larks” to swimming to hanging with the ladies—her relationships with different girls 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 dwelling for 30 years to each Austen and her life associate Gertrude Tate. Austen met the kindergarten and dance instructor in 1899, embarking on a relationship that might span greater than 5 a long time. 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 he or she and Tate have been evicted from Clear Consolation in 1945—Tate advocated for the preservation of Austen’s work. Their households denied the couple’s ultimate needs to be buried collectively.
At present, Alice Austen Home is dedicated to showcasing the breadth of the seminal photographer’s work and highlighting her heretofore ignored but influential function in LGBTQ+ historical past. The group is a member of the Nationwide Belief for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Properties and Studios program (beforehand) and is open to the general public Tuesday by way of Saturday.
When 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 way of July 26. The return of the archive to Austen’s ancestral dwelling 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 web site.
