Inventing pathways

Clear Comfort, Alice Austen house and museum, Staten Island

At the edge of the harbor, up nearly against the Verrazano bridge, there's a memorial and small museum in the Victorian cottage where Alice Austen lived. Here's a photographer who really did it — from the age of 11 she dedicated her time and energy to making pictures of her life, her friends, and eventually, her city.


Alice and her sea captain uncle who gave her a camera at age 11

From A History of Women Photographers, by Naomi Rosenblum:

...in the late 1880s she took advantage of the newly opened ferry line across New York Bay to travel to lower Manhattan and work in the streets around the Battery, Park Row, and the Lower East Side - an area housing large numbers of European immigrants. ... her pictures are remarkable for their specificity, their compelling visual organization, and their overall sharp focus. Austen left no written record of her thoughts about photography, but one imagines that using a camera made it possible for her to confront aspects of American life that otherwise would have been entirely out-of-bounds for a woman...

Alice Austen, 1888, by her uncle, Captain Müller

In the restored house I'm breathing the air of memory and trying to understand the energy and ambition that drove Alice Austen toward the city with 50 pounds of camera gear in tow - glass plates, bellows, lenses, tripods (forget digital...this was before the days of film!).

Organ Grinder, 1896

The New York Public Library digital collection has a selection of Austen's work available as digital previews.

Newsboys, 1896

And you can learn more about her amazing life and work on the Alice Austen museum website.

I'm inspired by what Austen did. In her pictures, even without a written record, we see curiosity and a desire to connect, to pay attention to her life. She did the work and, without hardly any models to speak of, she invented her own path.

In learning photography this is perhaps the hardest thing of all: starting along your own path. We've got so many models to follow, so many ways of working, so much mobility and information, so many options for technology and display (so much less to carry!), that we get distracted, overwhelmed, and forget the basic foundations of what we're doing.

Being a photographer, being an artist, begins with paying attention to our lives, and then doing it: making the pictures, taking those first steps. You can't know the end at the beginning.


Path in the front of the Alice Austen house.

The Alice Austen House is owned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, operated by the Friends of Alice Austen House, Inc., and is a member of the Historic House Trust. The gallery museum exhibits contemporary and historical photography under the direction and curatorship of Paul Moakley.