Alice Austen

Austen was a self-taught photographer, and primarily used photographic plates and a camera manufactured by the Scovill Company. She also meticulously recorded information about her photographs, including the glass plate brand, aperture, and exposure time. Austen used a darkroom, likely designed by her uncle, an amateur photographer and chemistry professor at Rutgers University, and produced over 7,000 photographs up through the 1930s, most notably depicting New York's immigrant populations, the inner lives and activities of Victorian women, and her travels to Europe. Austen is notable as one of the first female photographers to work outside of a studio and was known to transport up to fifty pounds of camera equipment on her bicycle. Austen considered herself an amateur photographer as she was independently wealthy and typically did not sell her work to support herself. She copyrighted much of her work, though little of it was ever marketed. In 1895, she began work on a portfolio project titled "Street Types of New York" made up of street photography portraits of various tradespeople in working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan. From the mid-1890s to 1912, Austen worked for Alvah H. Doty photographing the equipment and conditions at the Quarantine Station of Ellis Island. Many of her photographs from this time were featured in an exhibit at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and published in Harper's Weekly Magazine and Medical Record. Her work was also published in Violet Ward's Bicycling for Ladies in 1896, although she was not credited. The majority of her work was intended for private viewing, as they depicted intimate relationships between Victorian women and scenes from a non-traditional lifestyle, which included smoking, cross-dressing, and biking. Austen's work is today considered significant for providing a rare look into intimate and romantic relationships between Victorian women. In 1945, when Alice Austen was evicted from her lifelong home, Clear Comfort, she entrusted her archive to her longtime friend Loring McMillen at the Staten Island Historical Society (now known as Historic Richmond Town): a collection of over 7,500 original prints and negatives. In June 2025, Historic Richmond Town repatriated Alice Austen’s photographic archive to the Alice Austen House.

• Illustration — Hylan Boulevard, on which the Alice Austen House is located, has the alternative name, Alice Austen Way. In the 1960s, when the opening of the Verrazano–Narrows Bridge made waterfront property in Staten Island more valuable, a group of concerned citizens formed The Friends of Alice Austen to save her former home from demolition. Some preservationists involved in this effort included photographer Berenice Abbott, architect Phillip Johnson, and Margot Gayle. The campaign was ultimately successful, with the Landmarks Preservation Commission designating the house as a New York City Landmark, prompting the city to purchase the property in 1975. With over $1 million from the city's capital budget, the Alice Austen House was renovated and opened as a museum in 1985. The house was also designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1993. The Friends of Alice Austen House was formally incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1979, and continues to operate the house and surrounding garden in coordination with the Department of Parks and Recreation. In 1994, the Alice Austen House was the site of a demonstration by the activist group the Lesbian Avengers, who advocated for the acknowledgement of Austen and Tate's same-sex relationship. In 2017, the Alice Austen House was designated as a National LGBT Historic Site, and also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to incorporate Austen and Tate's relationship into the museum. In 1976, Austen's story was told in an episode of The 51st State, directed by Stuart Hersh, which inspired PS 60, in the Bulls Head neighborhood of Staten Island, to be named in her honor. A Staten Island Ferry boat is also named after her. Playwright Robin Rice's drama Alice in Black and White traces Austen's life from 1876 to 1951. The play also follows Oliver Jensen's search for and discovery of Austen and her glass plate negatives. The play first premiered at the Kentucky Center in 2013, and then at 59E59 Theaters in New York City in 2016, the 150th anniversary of Austen's birth. The play also received the StageWrite Women's Theatre Initiative Award at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. Her life and work has inspired two young adult fiction books. In 2022, Alex Gino published Alice Austen Lived Here, in which two non-binary middle schoolers do a US History report about Austen, and in 2025, Nora Neus published the graphic novel, Renegade Girls, fictionalizing a romance between Austen and her contemporary stunt girl reporter, Nell Cusack. In 2022, a podcast created by scholar Pamela Bannos in collaboration with the Alice Austen House Museum, titled My Dear Alice, was released, featuring excerpts from Austen's correspondence with various friends and family. There have been two biographies written about Austen: Alice's World: The Life and Photography of an American Original, by Ann Novotny in 1976, and Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, published in 2025 by Bonnie Yochelson.