Alice Austen

alt=A two-story, white, Dutch Colonial-style house with three dormer windows and shrubbery obscuring the front porch columns.

Elizabeth Alice Austen (March 17, 1866 – June 9, 1952) was an American photographer working in Staten Island. She is best known for her street photography and her intimate depictions of women's lives and relationships in the Victorian era.

Biography Alice Austen was born Elizabeth Alice Austen on March 17, 1866, in Rosebank, New York to Alice Cornell Austen and Edward Stopford Munn. Her great-great-grandfather, Peter Townsend, was the owner of Sterling Iron Works famous for forging the Hudson River Chain used to thwart British ships during the American Revolutionary War. Austen's father abandoned the family around 1869, prompting Austen and her mother to move to her family's Victorian Gothic farmhouse, nicknamed Clear Comfort, where they lived with Austen's maternal grandparents, her uncle Oswald Muller - a Danish sea captain, She was encouraged at a young age to pursue various activities and hobbies, and was first introduced to photography at the age of ten by her uncle Oswald who brought home a camera in 1878.

Photography 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 considered herself an amateur photographer as she was independently wealthy and typically did not sell her work to support herself.

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. In June 2025, Historic Richmond Town repatriated Alice Austen’s photographic archive to the Alice Austen House.

Later life alt=A headstone reading "E. Alice Austen, Photographer, March 17, 1866, June 9, 1952. There are blue and purple flowers with a purple bow beside it. Austen continued to take photographs of her home and friends, and of her travels in Europe with Tate, though many of her film negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were never printed. Austen was an active member of Staten Island society, founding the Staten Island Garden Club and participating in the Staten Island Bicycle Club. In 1929, Austen lost her savings in the Wall Street crash, and she and Tate financially struggled throughout the Great Depression. The two women worked to support themselves, with Tate offering dance classes and the brief establishment of a tea room in their home.

In 1951, historian and former LIFE magazine writer Oliver Jensen discovered her photographs, which had been transferred to the Staten Island Historical Society. 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. 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.

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