Alice Austen was born on March 17, 1866 in Rosbank, New York, United States. She was the daughter of Alice Cornell Austen and Edward S. Munn, an Englishman of whom little is known and who returned to London shortly after her birth and never returned. Austen thus lived with her mother and her maternal grandparents.
She lived a fashionable life marked by parties, excursions, and balls.
Austen attended the Errington School for Young Ladies.
Austen was given her first camera when she was ten years old and quickly became an avid photographer. An uncle taught her darkroom techniques. Her first photographs were centered around Clear Comfort, her grandparents' home on Staten Island; she then began to record the maritime events that took place in the vicinity (she was herself an expert sailor), and to portray her circle of friends.
At various times Austen owned at least six cameras. When she was about twenty, the period in which she began to produce her best work, she used a four-by-five Waterbury; she later used a custom-built eight-by-ten Graflex, and still later, in 1913, a smaller Graflex.
Sometime between 1895 and 1900 she also bought a pocket Kodak. Her favorite lens was the Perkens, and she used a magnesium flash, in capsule form, to illuminate her indoor scenes.
At one time she experimented with motion pictures. Austen often photographed herself, using a time-release device that she concealed behind a bush or laid under a carpet. She enjoyed the gadgetry and fun of new technology, and saw herself as a participant as well as a reporter of the life of her times.
It is worth noting that in Austen's pictures of the diversions of her circle, she occasionally took a decidedly defiant stance toward the sexual mores of her day. One particularly provocative photograph shows Austen and her friends dressed in men's clothing and laughing uproariously; the central figure of the group is posed with a cane jutting from between her legs.
She traveled extensively, owned one of the first cars on Staten Island, and taught herself automobile mechanics. Austen has long been held to have been strictly an amateur photographer, but her recent biographer, Ann Novotny, has pointed out that Austen's copyrighted series on New York street types, her sequence on federal quarantine hospitals, and her photographs of the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition of 1901 suggest that she did them on assignment, or at any rate intended to publish or exhibit them.
She also executed a series of amusingly posed photographs on bicycling for ladies which were used to illustrate a pamphlet on that subject written by her friend (and frequent subject) Violet Ward. A few of her pictures were also published in turn-of-the-century photographic journals, including Camera Mosaics.
Austen's productivity decreased severely around the end of World War I. Progressively crippling arthritis may have made it difficult for her to manipulate her camera, and by 1918 her world, too, had altered drastically. By that year she was the last surviving member of what had been the large and affectionate Clear Comfort household. She was joined there by her lifelong friend Gertrude Tate. The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out her funds, and she and Tate began to find it impossible to maintain Clear Comfort. She sold a few prized family possessions, then, in the early 1940's, unsuccessfully attempted to operate a restaurant.
In 1945 the mortgage on Clear Comfort foreclosed and Austen and Tate were evicted. Austen, then nearly eighty years old, was too proud to sell her remaining possessions on Staten Island, so she turned the entire contents of the house over to a Newark, N. J. , auctioneer, who sold them for about $600. She retained only the few items needed to furnish the small apartment that she had, with the help of friends, found for herself and Tate in nearby St. George.
Finally destitute, in 1950 Austen entered the City Farm Colony, the central Staten Island poorhouse. Several thousand of Austen's photographs, most in the form of the original glass-print negatives and painstakingly labeled with the exact time, date, available or artificial light, and other technical details of the exposure, were, at the time of her eviction from Clear Comfort, spirited away by Loring McMillen, the director of the Staten Island Historical Society. (Another group of glass plates, perhaps as many as 2, 000, were sold in Newark, and have not yet been located. ) A representative of the society then tried to interest publishers and museums in the Austen collection, with little success.
In 1951 Oliver Jensen and his assistant Constance Foulk Robert, in the course of doing research for Jensen's Revolt of American Women, happened upon the Austen collection. Jensen was horrified to discover that the artist, crippled and neglected, was still living in the Staten Island poorhouse. He visited her there and broke through her withdrawn and uncommunicative state by showing her recent enlargements of her work. Jensen and the Staten Island Historical Society then collaborated in publicizing and selling as many of Austen's photographs as possible, under an agreement whereby a substantial share of the proceeds went to Austen herself. Her pictures were published in Life, Holiday, and Pageant, among other magazines, and the money from their sale was sufficient to establish her in a private nursing home in August 1951.
There she lived for another ten months, enjoying appearances on television, as well as a special exhibition of her work in Richmondtown, Staten Island. She nonetheless died a pauper, on Staten Island, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Moravian Cemetery, New Dorp, Staten Island.
She mocked Victorian society and the restrictions it put on women. At the same time, she was thinking about gender roles and exploring her identity.
Austen wasn't married and didn't have children.
In 1899 Austen met Gertrude Amelia Tate, a kindergarten teacher and dancing instructor of Brooklyn, New York. She became Austen's lifelong companion. They stayed together until, after Stock Market Crash when they struggled to get by, Gertrude's family offered housing to Gertrude, and only her, in 1950. They wished to be buried together, but their families refused this wish.
