Alice Austen Her Life and Times page 1 of 3 Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Next Page>>

Twenty-two-year-old Miss E. Alice Austen poses in her Sunday best - a smart overskirt, and a hat decorated with white lilacs. She holds a parasol and a silver change purse. Photo taken in June 1888 by Captain Oswald Müller. Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society. Alice Austen was born on March 17, 1866, to Alice Cornell Austen and Edward Stopford Munn in the area of Clifton known today as Rosebank. She was not born in her grandparent's house, but in "Woodbine Cottage", about a quarter of a mile away. Since Alice's father deserted her mother before she was born her mother never used her married name. Alice was christened Elizabeth Alice Munn on May 23, 1866, in St. John's Church but she never used the name Munn and would later mark her glass plates with EAA for Elizabeth Alice Austen. With a small baby and no means of support, Alice's mother moved back to her parents home "Clear Comfort" where Alice would grow up the center of attention in a household that would eventually contain six adults and no other children. Alice was introduced to photography when her uncle, a Danish sea captain named Oswald Müller, brought home a camera when she was ten years old. This camera, long since lost, is believed to have been a dry plate camera of' British manufacture, possibly purchased by Captain Müller during one of the regular round-the-world voyages of the clipper ship he commanded. The photographer's mother, Alice Cornell Austen Munn, in the garden at "Clear Comfort," twenty years after being abandoned by her English husband. The black cat was named Tristan because her daughter enjoyed the American première of Wagner's opera. (Mamma & cat. September 6, 1887) Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society. Eighteen-year-old Alice, holding the pneumatic cable to release her camera's shutter by remote control, makes a portrait of herself, her dog Punch, Auntie Minn and Minn's husband, Oswald Müller. 1884. Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.                     As Müller experimented with the bulky wooden box, demonstrating it to his wife and other members of the Austen family in their garden, Alice watched, enchanted. Although she was only ten years old, she was patient and intelligent, and strong enough to hold the big camera steady on its tripod; her hands were naturally skillful at adjusting the simple mechanism. When it was time for uncle Oswald to sail away again, he gave Alice permission to use the camera in his absence. Demonstrating the way in which prints had to be rinsed ("Clear Comfort" had no running water for many years), a maid stands in for Miss Austen. "The water was cold as ice," the photographer reminisced years later. Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society. Alice's uncle Peter, by now a newly-appointed young professor of chemistry, realized that in her hands the camera would become something more than a toy. On his frequent visits home from Rutgers University he showed his enthusiastic niece how to use chemicals to develop the glass plates she exposed, and how to make prints from them. He and uncle Oswald helped Alice even further by installing, in an upstairs storage closet, a tiny home-built darkroom where Alice would spend hours on end developing plates, and toning and fixing her prints. Since there was no running water in the house when she was young, she carried her plates and prints down to the pump by the well in the back garden, winter and summer, to rinse them in basins of icy cold water (sometimes changing the rinse water as many as twenty-five times, according to her memory in later years). Fortunately Alice's family was sufficiently prosperous to provide her with the best of the equipment she required and indulgent enough to humor her enthusiasm for her unusual hobby.

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