← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Exploring the Life of Trailblazing Staten Island Photographer Alice Austen
00:24:40
Staten Island photographer Alice Austen was groundbreaking for her non-conformity to gender norms.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I wanted to shout out some of the conversations we're gonna be having on the show over the next few days. Tomorrow we'll speak with Tracy Wigfield, who helped create the new Netflix series the Four Seasons, along with actor Carrie Kenny Silver, who plays Anne. Of course, she was in the state as well. And on Thursday, we'll speak with the director of the documentary Barbara Walters, Tell Me Everything. It's currently screening at Tribeca and will stream on Hulu and Disney later this month. And on Friday ahead of Father's Day weekend, we want you to call in and and share stories about your dad. That is in the future. But let's get this hour started with the new book Too Good to Get the Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austin. Alice Austin is now known as a photographer who subverted Gilded Age gender norms. But it wasn't until the end of her life the world learned about Alice and her work. Alice Austin was born in 1866 and came from a wealthy Staten island family. As a young adult, she began pursuing photography as a passion. Her work captured the lives of her upper class friends, but it was also satirical and at times transgressive. She captured women dressing as men and photos of women that suggested a physical intimacy between them. Alice and her life partner, Gertrude Tate, lost their wealth in the Great Depression. In the process of being evicted from her Staten island home, Alice and her work were finally discovered. Now that home is a museum. Joining me now to discuss more about Alice Austin is Bonnie Yokelson. She's the author of the book Too Good to Get the Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austin. It's out now. Bonnie will be speaking at Saving Grace NYC on Thursday, June 26th. But first she joins me now in studio. Bonnie, welcome.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Thank you.
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Alison Stewart
When did you first get introduced to Alice Austin's work?
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Bonnie Yokelson
A long time ago. I'm a photo historian and basically around 2000 I learned of her work, but mostly in relation to her a body of work other than these satirical gender bending pictures. She did a portfolio called Street Types of New York, which were these pictures of working class people on the street in the mid-1890s and I had written books about Alfred Stieglitz's New York and Jacob Riis's photographs of New York. And they're roughly contemporaries. And these three people couldn't be more different as people or as photographers. So that's what originally drew me to the subject. Once I really got into it, it became clear to me eventually that these gender bending pictures were not only the most historically significant, but also kind of the pivot point in her personal story.
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Unknown
Obviously, there's all this interest in the Gilded Age because of the HBO series. How would you describe Alice Austin's life in the Gilded Age?
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Bonnie Yokelson
Thank you for asking me that. Because when I saw the Gilded Age show, it was like, bingo. This is exactly right. And of course, Alice Austin photographed this world. So I. Visually, I knew what I was talking about. And it's exactly right. And in fact, so Staten island was kind of New York's first suburb. People started moving there. New Yorkers, Manhattanites, started moving there in the 1840s. Among them, her grandfather, John Haggerty Austin, who bought this old Dutch farmhouse, which he renovated as, at the time, mid 19th century, very fashionable Victorian cottage. And Alice and her mother spent their.
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Unknown
Whole life there because her father left the family.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Yes, correct. Actually, one of the things I discovered, one of the big detective pieces of detective work, is that Alice said that. And people followed her lead to say that she and her mother were abandoned by their father, who was English, and that he returned to England, never to be found. Turns out he was in Brooklyn and living with his parents. And the family was connected, you know, had relationships with. Not with him that I know of, but with his siblings. And he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery along with his parents. So that's kind of, you know, it's a mystery solved. To only create more mysteries. Oh, my gosh. Which is very. Actually very gilded Age.
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Unknown
Very gilded age. I was going to say you can just disappear someone, but it turns out they're in Brooklyn.
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Bonnie Yokelson
They're in Brooklyn. And then it's sort of like, well, did Alice know him? When did Alice learn this? Did you know what was her. Did she have a relationship with the family? Why did she and her mother return to their. The maiden name would sort of suggest something that maybe she was born out of wedlock. I mean, why would they risk that? It was just. There's just so many questions that it brings up. Unsolved.
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Unknown
Well, we said that she's from a wealthy Staten island family. Do we know how the family got its wealth?
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Bonnie Yokelson
Yes. Great grandfather John Embry Austin was an auctioneer. And we're Talking now, like after the War of 1812 in Manhattan and the auctioneer business was well protected. I learned very interestingly, I was really interested in like, where does the money come from?
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Yeah. And that auctioneers had a very privileged place in New York, legally were protected and actually had offered a better deal to people wanting to buy European goods than wholesalers just because of the tax provisions, the tariff provisions and things like that at the time. So David Embry Austin became extremely wealthy and he was actually the founder, most responsible for founding Grace Church. He chose the land, he chose James Renwick as the architect. So there's a lot of kind of New York moving and shaking going on, but this is the generation before the Gilded Age. So Alice's grand. So that's where the money came from. And Alice's grandfather took over that business, which didn't fare as well in the 1850s and then after the war, but he did fine. And Alice grew up basically independently without having to work and being able to live a lavish lifestyle, which meant she loved fashion, she had lots of expensive hobbies like photography. And she, you know, she lived among the sort of leisured, wealthy class of people in Staten island who were in fact compared at the time to like New York's 400. You know, these were very. And actually of the generation after her grandfather, much more wealth, you know, post Civil War fortunes. And actually it was her ambition to kind of make her place in that set the very wealthy. And she did, she succeeded.
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Alison Stewart
I was going to ask how aware of her wealth was Alice.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Totally, yeah. I mean, because this is a world in which her best friend, one of her very, very best friends, she kept these incredible scrapbooks documenting her jam packed social calendar in the 1880s. When she was kind of coming out, she didn't have a formal coming out, but by the time she hit 18, she was going to dances and balls and yachting events and playing tennis and doing charity work, contributing very much, sort of gilded eight very much the life depicted in, you know, that was her life. And she had the money to keep up, but it was more. And so she kept these scrapbooks notating everything. So one of the things that really jumped out to me is one of her best friends, her youngest, her first friend to get married, Julie Marsh, there were a thousand people invited to her wedding.
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Alison Stewart
A thousand. I'm imagining that today.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Right.
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Alison Stewart
Can you imagine what that was?
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Bonnie Yokelson
Well, and it was on Staten Island. So they had special boats arranged for guests who were coming from Manhattan and from Brooklyn. And the newspaper, it Was covered, obviously, in the newspapers for all three places, with lavish descriptions of the decorations and the food and. And what the women were wearing, including Alice. You know, so this is the kind of world that she grew up in. And as I say, she was very competitive, both socially and actually as an athlete and in every way. So she really wanted to make her mark.
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Alison Stewart
We're talking about the book Too Good to Get the Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austin. It's by my guest, Bonnie Yokelson. When did she first pick up a camera?
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Bonnie Yokelson
When she was. The first known Pictures are from 1884, I think. That is. She had told a story that she had started taking pictures when she was earlier, which I think is not true. The first pictures are 1884. She was 18. This is the year that her Uncle Oswald, who was a sea captain, he's another amazing story, but he was an amateur photographer, and she claims that exposed her to the camera, taught her the rudiments of how to use the. How to take pictures. And the earliest known pictures in her archive are from 1884, with portraits of her by Oswald, of Oswald and Aunt Min, and Alice and her dog Pug, named Punch, out in the lawn in their house in Staten Island. So I think that was the start. And one of the things that I was able to do that was. That took a really long time, but was core to the narrative, which was Alice. There are almost. There are 7,500 prints and negatives in the archive, which was one of the main reasons I want to write the book, because all this was digitized and cataloged and available to me on a laptop and searchable in a database. So I was able to actually put all. And Alice had written on her glass negative sleeves the subjects and the dates of all of these pictures. So I had access to this, so I could actually line up all the pictures in order. And then putting that together with those amazing scrapbooks was able to really understand the chronology of her work and her life. There are no diaries, but, you know, these were. You know, these were remarkable. You know, in fact, the scrapbooks and the photographs were like a diary, visual diaries. And I forgot exactly what I wanted to say.
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Unknown
I did want to dive in, though, because I do want to say that you're very honest about Alice's limitations, that she was often prejudiced against minority groups. That becomes clear. Where can we see those limitations in her work?
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Bonnie Yokelson
Well, that's a very complicated question, because, for example, she loved commercial culture of her day, which included racist cartoons. She loved minstrel shows, which was part of her world. This was not unusual at all. This boating club in her neighborhood put on a minstrel show as a fundraiser. And she kept the invitation in one of those scrapbooks printed in brown ink on tan, you know, so that's the sort of downside. But the truth is that this commercial culture really fed her work in a positive way, because that spirit of, you know, this was humor. And it wasn't just the racial ones. She loved visual humor. And that's contributes to, for example, the picture of her and her friends dressed up as men or dressed as prostitutes and masks, pretending to smoke cigarettes or feigning drunkenness. I mean, so that kind of for her generation in particular, I mean, I really had to give this thought. The minstrel show in particular falsely gave this, these, the social set permission to break norms. In other words, oh, we're going to wear crazy wild colors and act out, you know. And that was the inspiration came in large part from minstrelsy. But those very famous pictures are in some sense share the spirit of that. But it's women mocking the ritual, mocking men, and sort of punching up rather than down in a way that's actually really interesting to understanding her and also appreciating and enjoying those pictures.
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Unknown
Now, from all of the researches you did, you did, what did you come to understand how she thought about gender and how she thought about gender norms at the time, even though she was taking. Because she was taking these kind of unusual pictures.
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Bonnie Yokelson
That's the. The key question. Thank you. This is what I mean. I'm not a gender historian or a biographer, but really I felt I had to make sense of those famous pictures. And so that's the road it led me down. And with a lot of research and help from actually experts in fields that were not mine, I came to understand that growing up as a Victorian woman, she grew up in a world where passionate relationship between girls was accepted and not judged because it was assumed that all women, heterosexual or homosexual, had no sexual desire at all. So these very passionate relationships between young girls and older girls and women, and sometimes women who became partners if they could afford to support themselves, were not seen as any kind of stigma. And so it's hard. So when Alice is playing with her girlfriends, who's to know what's actually going on? But they were safe to do that. And then everything changed. Actually, at the time Alice came of age in the late 1890s, there was a movement of women asserting their rights, women going to college, women having careers, women very aggressively taking on athletics, which was seen as a threat to their health and their reproductive health. All sorts of challenges to gender norms were happening around her in the late 1890s. And also sexual experimentation among women, which started to be noticed more and more by the culture at large. And that is documentedthere is documentation which, you know, of a romantic affair, actually a romantic triangle, kind of very sad, screwed up one between her and two of her two women friends, which lasted for three or four years, which. And then that ended when she met Gertrude Tate when she was in her early 30s. And then she and Gertrude Tate were lifetime partners. They were together for 50 years. And then, of course, having lived until the 1950s, they lived under this. What happened was. Okay, one other step in this. I know it's complicated. It took me a long time to figure it out. But there was a backlash to this rebellion among women. The magazines called it, dubbed it the New Woman. And so in 1894, exactly when Alice is involving with these other women, founding the Bicycle Club of Staten island, which bicycles were considered very risque for women. And so the way this. What happens is a group of doctors, male doctors, of course, called sexologists, said, you know what? We better take another look at women's sexuality.
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Unknown
Yeah, no doubt.
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Bonnie Yokelson
And interestingly, one of the most important books in English about this, written by Havelock Ellis, was not about women's sexuality, but on altogether, but about perverted women's sexuality. About the invert, a term that was used to describe women who were attracted to women, women who didn't want, women who dressed in a manly fashion. These were all seen as a kind of pathology. So by the time. So Alice, as I say, grew up throughout this entire period, starting with this earlier sort of romantic friendship that was accepted and into this moment of revolt, rebellion.
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Unknown
It's so interesting that she lived through so many different changes in her lifestyle. I mean, her lifetime.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Yeah. So by the time in the 20th century when the invert was something, was a word of. I don't know, what's the right word, you know, seen as something either immoral or ill. She and Gertrude were this happy couple. They were already a happy couple, but they were lesbian couple who had to navigate this world of censure. So they lived through all. She lived through all these different. So when you say, how did she think about her sexuality? You have to see these changes in the environment. And so that's the end. That's the unfortunate long answer. There's only a long answer to that question, but it's really the core question.
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Unknown
I wanted to ask about the COVID of the book too good to get the Life of photographs of Ms. Alice Austin by Bonnie Yogelson. In this picture, it's two women, four women, and they're sort of. How would you describe them?
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Bonnie Yokelson
Okay, this is a very. This is one of her most famous pictures. This is sort of queer, you know, icon, iconic image, this image, because it's four women with their. Two couples back to back with their sort of embracing. Each couple embracing the other with their arms on either their hips or on their back, but, you know, hugging each other as if this. So it not only suggests love, but community. And so it has. It reads fantastically. And these were best friends, these four women. There's Alice and Trudy Eggleston, who. They're the left hand couple. And Julie Marsh and her cousin Sue Ripley are the right hand couple. And they were part. And Alice gave a name to that picture called the Darned Club, which she wrote on the negative, which she explained later to a journalist at the very end of her life, that the Darn Club was what men called their club because the men were excluded. So again, that just amplifies the meaning that it's a woman's world. As it turns out, the couple on the right, Julia Marsh, had just gotten married and was five months pregnant in the picture. And she has her arms around her first cousin, Sue Ripley, who was her neighbor. The other woman with Alice, Trudy Eggleston, also ended up getting married. So in other words, it's not literally a picture about women loving women, certainly in any kind of romantic way, but the Darned Club I found in a letter turned. This is an amazing. One of these weird detective things was actually they called it the Darning Club and they had gotten together. My theory is in reaction to Julia, the first of their friends to get married. She was the one with a thousand invitations. They had been really close before, and those four women before had had a cooking club. And so they founded another club to keep close.
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Alison Stewart
Keep close to each other.
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Bonnie Yokelson
And very much. I mean, of the four of them, it was Julie in this particular picture who was most threatened. You know, their solidarity as women was most threatened because she had just gotten married and was having her first child. And so it is a picture about excluding men and staying together as women, but not necessarily sexually.
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Alison Stewart
When we think about Alice Austin's work, what is it about her work that makes it. I don't want to say makes it artistic, not amateurish.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Oh, my goodness, that's a great question. In this period, these wealthy people that invested in learning the very difficult mechanics of photography. In the 1880s, there was a huge explosion of the amateur movement exploded all over the world. And so being an amateur took a lot of work, was actually kind of a badge of honor. Like if you were an amateur of any benefit, you were, you know, that was a very positive thing. What happened in Alice's time was actually the rise of the pictorial movement, which was amateur photographers aspiring to make pictures that looked like other arts. Preeminent in that whole movement was Alfred Stieglitz, who was in Manhattan and who was Alice's contemporary. But Alice wasn't interested in pictorial art at all, nor was she interested in any of the clubs. So her work was amateur in the slightly more old fashioned sense. But it didn't mean she wasn't as much an artist or certainly as much a craftsman. She just didn't aspire to a certain form of photography. So again, it's a tricky distinction, but she was a very serious and accomplished amateur and never called herself an artist. But other people complimented her work and said, your work is. You are an artist.
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Alison Stewart
So people know.
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Unknown
Some of Alice Austin's photographs are being handed over to the Alice Austin Museum.
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Alison Stewart
Later this month, so you can go see them there.
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Unknown
You can also check out the book Too Good to Get the Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austin. It's by Bonnie Yokelson.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you for coming in.
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Bonnie Yokelson
Oh, thank you. My pleasure.
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Ira Flatow
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