Alice Austen was one of the first women photographers in this country to work outside the confines of a studio. She was also a realistic documentary photographer - a style of photography unusual until the 20th century. With a natural instinct for photojournalism some forty years before that word was coined, she saw the world with a clear eye and photographed the people and places in it, as they actually appeared, giving US a visual record of more than fifty years of social history.

Alice's interest in photography began at the age of ten when her Uncle Oswald brought home a camera from one of his many voyages abroad. Through experimentation she taught herself how to operate the complex camera mechanism, judge exposure, develop the heavy glass plates, and make prints. Alice also took copious notes about the picture making process. On the envelopes in which she stored her negatives she diligently penciled the brand name of the plate and of the lens she had used, the exposure time, the aperture and focal distance, light conditions, the subject, and the exact time at which se had taken the photograph. Poring over these envelopes later, she learned to correct her mistakes. By the time she was eighteen Alice was an experienced and highly accomplished photographer. Working steadily and taking pictures almost every day for the next five decades, Alice produced about 9,000 photographs of which some 3,500 still exist.

A stout pole and a rock brace Daisy as she demonstrates the wrong way to round a curve ("Incorrect position - leaning against the inclination"). Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.

In her earliest photographs Alice's devotion to "Clear Comfort" was especially evident. Her home was the backdrop and subject of her images as she recorded in extensive and loving detail family members, friends, and happy events. These photographs captured a relaxed upper middle class enjoying a long-vanished social life of ritualized leisure pursuits. From picnicking in the mountains, cavorting at the beach, and bowling parties in the private alley at a friend's mansion, to the new game of lawn tennis, the sport she enjoyed with the greatest enthusiasm, and the latest fad of bicycling, on the new "safety" bicycles with their pneumatic tires, along the unpaved roads of Staten Island - Alice's camera captured it all. It has been said that it was Alice's athletic stamina, as much as her artistic sense, that made her such an extraordinary photographer. She even climbed atop a fencepost, not caring if she exposed her ankles, in pursuit of the picture she wanted of a local auto speed trial.

Occasionally Alice undertook photographic projects of a quasi-commercial nature to oblige friends. When Violet Ward decided to write a book, Bicycling for Ladies, in 1896, Alice photographed another friend, gymnast Daisy Elliott, as a model demonstrating the correct (and dangerously incorrect) positions in which to turn corners, coast, dismount and turn the vehicle upside down for repairs. Daisy posed motionless, her bicycle supported by a stout pole that later was made invisible when the illustrations were reproduced. Miss Elliott, a professional teacher of gymnastics, also requested that Alice photograph her smartly uniformed students in her studio with its impressive array of calisthenics equipment.

In the upstairs laboratories on Hoffmann Island, a chemist works with a pressurized, steam-heated sterilizer and bacterial cultures in the "media room." (Quarantine. "Fred" at work. Bright day. 11:10 am, Mon., April 29,1901. Cramer Crown, Waterbury lense, 10 ft., counted 18) Photo courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.

Alice also took an extensive series of photographs - almost as a professional assignment, at the request of Dr. Doty of the U.S. Public Health Service - of the local Quarantine Station in the early 1890's. During this time, half a million immigrants a year were sailing into New York, as the greatest mass immigration in human history got under way. The immigrants were admitted through the newly-built (1892) federal station on Ellis Island, but before they were allowed to enter the harbor, all ships had to pause for inspection at the Quarantine Station just south of the Austen house. To provide additional space for quarantine facilities, two small islands off the eastern shore of Staten Island were enlarged with landfills. The work of the Quarantine Station so fascinated Alice that she returned with her camera, year after year, for more than a decade, to record the equipment, laboratories, buildings and people of Hoffman and Swinburn islands and the shore station near her home. These particular photographs reveal her natural instinct for photojournalism. Alice's reluctance to abandon a photographic subject until she covered it thoroughly can be seen in this exhaustive series of pictures that were commissioned and then exhibited in Buffalo at the Pan American Exposition of 1901.