Clear comfort, the house where photographer Alice Austen grew up and lived most of her life, was not one of the large estates that the rich were built in the 19th century on Staten Island to get away from Manhattan. But the 11 cozy rooms, built around and on top of an older Dutch structure with one room, and the wide green lawns that lead to the port of New York, offered enough space for several family members and a small household staff. It was also the setting for most of her best photos. Saved from the demolition ball by passionate locals, as well as cultural luminaires such as photographer Berenice Abbott and theater producer Joseph Papp, the house is now a museum that is known as known as Alice Austen House. In 2017 it became the First nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ HistoryNot least because of earlier Protests led by the Lesbian Avengers Increasingly that the Museum Austen’s 50-year-old relationship with Gertrude Tate recognizes. The house is also a central character in the new biography of Bonnie Yochelson, Too good to get married: The life and photos of Miss Alice Austen.
Although Yochelson does not dive into it, Austen and her family may prefer to learn in their States of Island house and the social clubs that only visited members, because the United States of the late 1800s were acquired by labor attacks, racing riots, anti-immigrant presentation and a level of class inequality that has only recently been surpassed. Although we do not hear directly from Austen about the politics of her time, the clarity of Yochelson about her informal involvement in the racist and anti-immigrant density of her day, and telling details, such as Austen who pay for an offer in the old money guide, Social registerPresent enough insight. In other words, Austen was not a progressive lesbian hero. Instead, her images offer tempting glimpse of intimacy in women at a time when only a small number of women were behind the camera, and even less offered everything that could be described as a lesbian look today.
The photos that Austen took from the 1880s to the early 190s are the main reason why we know her today, and the book by Yochelson is not skimpy on reproductions. They are often placed in the walls and green of clear comfort, against the spectacular view of what was then an endless busy harbor in New York, or within the well -entertaining gathering places of her echelon. But these images were appointed (a necessity that at the time the state of technology at that time) include humor and playfulness and speak to its vicinity to its subjects, because they also demonstrate growing control of the form.
Although Austen was worthwhile to assemble many prints, and even make copyright on a part of her work, her classes -tendencies that she never accepted money for her photos, nor she set up her own studio. And after meeting Gertrude Tate in the late 1890s, the woman who would remain her partner for the rest of her life, drove her attention. Without the need or desire to generate income, and no longer feel inclined to produce work to maintain social networks, she just lets the practice go. Yochelson describes her photos after the beginning of the 1900s as “usually not teem.”
When Austen lost all her hereditary wealth in the stock market crash of 1929, apart from the house and its content, things took a turn. Neither her family nor her earlier connections prevented her from died in poverty, a horror common fate for LGBTQ+ women. By the mid -1940s, the two women had sold everything they could, including the photographic archive of Austen. Tate could no longer manage Austen’s care, so they left the house, in which Austen eventually declared themselves a pauper to be admitted to that of New York Farm colony.
Just like far too many female artists, Austen was ‘discovered’ on an incredibly advanced age. A 1951 TO LIVE The magazine profile helped to bring her and her work to a national audience. Yet she died the following year, with her care and housing back in the dark. According to Yochelson, the States Island Historical Society (now known as Historical city Richmond), who had acquired her photographic archive and held it to alone Last springHeld back money they owed her before her death.
It is difficult to imagine that all changes that Austen has seen with clear comfort during her decades, but stick to that place and the remains of the world that the represented by what her limited her are part of what her limited. The times that she lived offer incidental echoes of the world in which we are currently finding ourselves, when collecting extreme wealth has radically changed our political landscape and the desire to insulate and segregate are in the center of the framework. A ripe tension is the core of her life – from a young age she wanted to find her own way and enjoy it privately to test the boundaries of her gender, while she also clung to the privileges that she assumed she would have access for the rest of her life. This tension is more a subtext than a story in Yochelson’s book. However, it points to the reasons why it is not as unusual as people being able to think for conservatism and queernness to exist next to each other.
Too good to get married: The life and photos of Miss Alice Austen (2025) Bonnie Yochelson is published by Fordham University Press and is available Online and through independent booksellers.
