Clear Consolation, the house the place photographer Alice Austen grew up and lived for almost all of her life, was not one of many giant estates the rich constructed within the nineteenth century on Staten Island to get away from Manhattan. However its 11 comfortable rooms, constructed round and atop an older one-room Dutch construction, and its vast inexperienced lawns main all the way down to the New York Harbor shore, supplied area sufficient for a number of members of the family and a small family employees. It was the setting for many of her most interesting images as properly. Saved from the wrecking ball by impassioned locals, in addition to cultural luminaries comparable to photographer Berenice Abbott and theater producer Joseph Papp, the house is now a museum often known as Alice Austen Home. In 2017, it grew to become the first nationally designated web site of LGBTQ+ historical past, in no small half due to earlier protests led by the Lesbian Avengers insisting that the museum acknowledge Austen’s 50-plus 12 months relationship with Gertrude Tate. The house can also be a central character in Bonnie Yochelson’s new biography, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Pictures of Miss Alice Austen.
Although Yochelson doesn’t delve into it, Austen and her household may need most well-liked to remain largely sequestered inside their Staten Island dwelling and the members-only social golf equipment they frequented as a result of the US of the late 1800s was riven by labor strikes, race riots, anti-immigrant sentiment, and a degree of sophistication inequality that has solely just lately been exceeded. Whereas we don’t hear instantly from Austen on the politics of her time, Yochelson’s readability about her informal engagement with the racist and anti-immigrant tropes of her day, and telling particulars, comparable to Austen paying for an inventory within the outdated cash listing, Social Register, current sufficient perception. In different phrases, Austen was no progressive lesbian hero. As an alternative her pictures provide tantalizing glimpses of intimacies amongst girls at a time when solely a tiny variety of girls have been behind the digital camera, and even fewer provided something that may very well be described at present as a lesbian gaze.
The images Austen took from the Eighteen Eighties into the early 1900s are the first cause we all know her at present, and Yochelson’s guide doesn’t skimp on reproductions. They’re typically set throughout the partitions and greenery of Clear Consolation, in opposition to its spectacular views of what was then an endlessly busy New York Harbor, or throughout the well-kept gathering locations of her echelon. These pictures, although posed (a necessity given the state of the know-how on the time), embrace humor and playfulness, and converse to her closeness to her topics, as in addition they exhibit a rising mastery of the shape.
Although Austen went to the difficulty of mounting many prints, and even copyrighting a few of her work, her class proclivities meant she by no means accepted cash for her footage, nor did she arrange a studio of her personal. And after assembly Gertrude Tate within the late Nineties, the girl who would stay her accomplice for the remainder of her life, her consideration drifted. With out the necessity or want to generate revenue, and not feeling inclined to supply work to keep up social networks, she merely let the apply go. Yochelson describes her images after the early 1900s as “principally unmemorable.”
When Austen misplaced all of her inherited wealth within the 1929 inventory market crash, apart from the home and its contents, issues took a flip. Neither her household nor her earlier connections prevented her from dying in poverty, a gruellingly widespread destiny for LGBTQ+ girls. By the mid-Forties, the 2 girls had offered all the pieces they might, together with Austen’s photographic archive. Tate may not handle Austen’s care, and they also left the home, with Austen finally declaring herself a pauper with the intention to be admitted to New York’s Farm Colony.
Like far too many ladies artists, Austen was “found” at an extremely superior age. A 1951 LIFE journal profile helped convey her and her work to a nationwide viewers. But she died the next 12 months, along with her care and housing again in limbo. Based on Yochelson, the Staten Island Historic Society (now often known as Historic Richmond City), which had acquired and held her photographic archive till simply this previous spring, withheld cash they owed her earlier than her dying.
It’s arduous to think about all of the adjustments Austen witnessed throughout her a long time at Clear Consolation, however holding quick to that place and the vestiges of the world it represented are a part of what restricted her. The occasions by which she lived present occasional echoes of the world we discover ourselves in proper now, when the amassing of utmost wealth has radically altered our political panorama and the will to isolate and segregate are on the heart of the body. A ripe stress is on the core of her life — she wished to hunt her personal path from an early age and privately get pleasure from testing the boundaries of her gender, whereas additionally clinging to the privileges she assumed she would have entry to for the remainder of her life. This stress is extra of a subtext than a story in Yochelson’s guide. Nevertheless, it factors to the explanation why it’s not as unusual as individuals may suppose for conservatism and queerness to coexist.
Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Pictures of Miss Alice Austen (2025) by Bonnie Yochelson is printed by Fordham College Press and is obtainable on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
