Alice Austen: Photography, Love, and Legacy at Clear Comfort

Explore Alice Austen's life, photography & legacy at Clear Comfort. From Victorian society to queer love, her images capture freedom & self-expression. Rediscovered, her work inspires artists today.

It was an excellent point: social strictures aside, Austen had the period’s technical restraints to consider. She worked with a cumbersome wood box electronic camera that might consider as much as fifty extra pounds when fully outfitted, and Munro approximated that an indoor picture like the masked tableau would certainly have required its topics to hold still for a direct exposure of thirty secs to a min.

Clear Comfort: A Childhood Haven

The Alice Austen Home was originally a seventeenth-century Dutch framework, which Austen’s mother’s affluent household renovated in time right into a resort from Manhattan. They named it Clear Comfort. Alice matured there amidst both privilege and unusual scenarios: soon after her birth, her daddy deserted his spouse and child, leading them to move in with her mommy’s family. Clear Comfort was where Alice, as the adored just youngster in a residence full of adults, discovered to take pictures. An uncle brought home an electronic camera and showed her just how to use it; upstairs, in a darkroom the dimension of a bed linen closet, she established her photos.

The Larky Life: Capturing Social Worlds

These images are collected at the Alice Austen Residence on a wall surface labelled “The Larky Life,” the photographer’s term for recreation searches a lot more normally. The social globe translucented her lens– ladies riding bicycles, ladies playing tennis, females embracing each other– has a tempting vividness. It’s simple to visualize that globe repurposed for one of those television collection where youths in bodices have actually spunky experiences readied to ahistorical popular song, like “Dickinson” or “The Buccaneers.” There have, actually, gone to the very least 2 Y.A. publications fixated Austen: one, “Renegade Girls,” by Nora Neus, is a visuals novel concerning queer love set in the professional photographer’s day; the other, “Alice Austen Lived Below,” by Alex Gino, is a tale regarding modern queer teenagers finding her work. (The manager Bonnie Yochelson’s Austen biography, published earlier this year, bears the wry title “Too Good to Get Married.”) The gallery embraces the sense of individual connection its subject inspires. “To do this job well, you need to enjoy Alice,” the exec supervisor, Victoria Munro, told me. Austen herself stays a little bit of a cipher: her very own letters have actually been lost, making instances of her voice limited. However making it through correspondence from her close friends recommends the shapes of somebody that recognized how to enjoy. One close friend, impatient for Austen to join her on vacation upstate, contacts describe the type of high jinks that wait for: “I never giggled so tough in all my life. I was the only lady and such singing and screaming I never heard prior to … You had much better bring your banjo along.” (In 2022, the letters were the basis for a podcast called “My Precious Alice,” created by the musician Pamela Bannos in collaboration with the Alice Austen House.).

Alice Austen House: Then and Now

The Alice Austen Home is a Victorian Gothic cottage on the Staten Island waterside, and on the warm loss day that I checked out, the view over the harbor was brilliant and blue. Inside, the air smelled like salt water, which suited the existing exhibition: “She Sells Seashells,” curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an expedition of job by queer females artists who have discovered flexibility and community at the seaside.

It’s a tough time to be running a museum, especially one with an identitarian bent. “Everybody is hurting,” Munro informed me. “Everybody has experienced shortages and cuts.” (Even Trump’s tariffs were making their presence felt. A piece in the existing program delivered from abroad– a cyanotype pillow case covering an audio speaker that played sea sounds, by the artist SHARP– had obtained stuck in New Jersey awaiting payment.) Not all recent modifications have actually been undesirable. Near the end of her life, Austen gave a number of her pictures to the Staten Island Historic Society; this year, they have ultimately been gone back to the museum’s own collection, supplying an enormous new cache of product to brochure and digitize. Munro was holding onto an energized feeling of function. “Leading with joy in this moment seems like a rebellion,” she stated.

Photography was not an unusual leisure activity for a young female of her milieu, and several of Austen’s very early images depict a world of cultured Victorian amusements– parties gathered on verandas and scenic neglects, delighted pugs, warm days in leg-of-mutton sleeves.: Austen and two of her women pals dressed in males’s garments and fake mustaches, mugging and laughing; Austen, once more with two women close friends, all in bed together, arms tossed behind their heads; and– maybe most memorably– Austen and another lady, their long hair loose, wearing white undergarments and tiny white masks, standing with cigarettes in their mouths and encounters close.

Financial Hardship and Rediscovery

Austen’s trajectory, like that of several artists in New york city, ultimately hinged on the vicissitudes of realty. At Clear Convenience, she developed an existence of exceptional self-reliance– for thirty years, she lived there together with Tate, with whom she ‘d dropped in love throughout a trip in the Catskills. (One woozy series of photos shows a young Tate dance outside in the sun.) Austen’s family members money was shed in the collision of 1929, and she and Tate, after having a hard time to support themselves, were obliged to market off numerous of their ownerships– including a collection of coverings, offering a bittersweet edge to the existing show’s title. In 1944, they sold your home. Tate at some point relocated with her household, that rejected Austen; Austen moved to the Staten Island Ranch Colony, a pauper’s healthcare facility.

A previous Life magazine author discovered Austen’s work in 1951, and a brand-new rise of passion and assistance recovered her to an action of simplicity, prior to her death in 1952. Clear Comfort was protected many thanks to the initiatives of Austen’s new fans (consisting of the professional photographer Berenice Abbott). It ran temporarily as a rather traditional historic-house gallery: the roped-off areas held an assortment of about duration furnishings, with little that specified to Austen’s life there. The house’s official accounts elided her connection with Tate, inspiring the activist group the Lesbian Avengers to present a protest beyond it in the nineties. In 2017, though, it was named a National L.G.B.T.Q. Historic Site, and today it forefronts Tate as a crucial part of Austen’s story.

Austen’s Enduring Vision

Alice Austen was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographer who invested most of her life on this particular piece of shoreline, initially with her household and later on with her companion, Gertrude Tate. An undated beach picture of hers shows three ladies set down along the side of the waves, euphoria noticeable in their posture also as their faces are turned from the video camera. Her work, which is interspersed throughout the exhibit, recommends a quietly persistent lineage for the much more forthright work on view by artists of recent years. In Austen’s 1885 picture “Group in Showering Costumes,” 5 ladies posture in jaunty bloomers and knee-length chitons, revealing dramatically less skin however just as much perky self-possession as the naked cartoon amazons wallowing in Ana Benaroya’s 2022 drawing “By the Ocean’s Roar.” Rolls-Bentley, in her intro to the program, writes that the contemporary works “converse” with Austen’s, “weaving individual histories and cumulative memory right into a shore-bound archive of need, renewal, care, and possibility.”

Austen frequently composed detailed captions on the envelopes in which she stored her negatives. For this image of her with a close friend, she wrote, “Trude & I Concealed Brief Skirts, August 6, 1891.” Photographs by Alice Austen/ Courtesy Collection of Alice Austen House

“Photos by Alice Austen/ Politeness Collection of Alice Austen Residence

The Alice Austen House was originally a seventeenth-century Dutch structure, which Austen’s mommy’s rich household redesigned over time into a resort from Manhattan.: Austen and 2 of her female pals dressed in men’s clothes and fake mustaches, mugging and laughing; Austen, again with two female close friends, all in bed with each other, arms threw behind their heads; and– maybe most memorably– Austen and one more lady, their lengthy hair loose, using white undergarments and tiny white masks, standing with cigarettes in their mouths and encounters close.

There have, in truth, been at least 2 Y.A. publications centered on Austen: one, “Insurgent Girls,” by Nora Neus, is a graphic unique about queer love set in the professional photographer’s day; the various other, “Alice Austen Lived Here,” by Alex Gino, is a tale concerning modern queer teenagers finding her work. Tate ultimately moved in with her household, that rejected Austen; Austen relocated to the Staten Island Ranch Colony, a poor person’s healthcare facility.