Alice Austen’s Type of Town

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Ten years ago, Paul Moakley discovered the archives of the Staten Island photographer Alice Austen when he started curating shows at Clear Comfort, a museum that was once Ms. Austen’s home. That initial discovery began a long process that has pretty much taken over his life: he now lives at the museum and works as its caretaker.

He sometimes feels that Ms. Austen suffers the same fate as the borough, mentioned briefly in surveys but mostly overlooked.

“It’s always quite a narrow view of what she does and her place in photography,” said Mr. Moakley, deputy photo editor at Time magazine. “She’s always depicted as the documentarian of social life on Staten Island, or Victorian girls’ life, but she really was a documentarian who went out into the city and made this interesting body of work about street types.”

Alice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House An egg stand on Hester Street in Manhattan. April 18, 1895.

Her portfolio, “Street Types of New York,” published in 1896, was the product of several years spent making formal, almost archetypal, portraits of various people at work. It is also the inspiration for a show Mr. Moakley helped curate, “The New Street Types of New York,” which features contemporary portraits by photographers including Ruddy Roye, who has a widely followed Instagram feed of his Brooklyn neighbors, and Susannah Ray, who has been documenting the surfing community in her neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.

Mr. Moakley said he hoped the show would spur others to delve into Ms. Austen’s work in New York City and make the connection between her and today’s artists.

“People have had a hard time grasping her,” he said. “She photographed everything she encountered and was curious about. Altogether, she created a portrait of someone who was complex, layered and fun.”

In some ways, Mr. Moakley said, her story was a modern one. Although she was born into wealth in 1866, she and her mother had to move in with her grandparents when her father deserted the family. There she lived with an extended family, including an uncle, Oswald, who gave her a camera he had brought home from an overseas business trip. She was about 10 years old.

Mr. Moakley said the young Ms. Austen took to photography but broke away from the era’s conventions. She experimented a lot, taking her camera on sailboats or shooting from moving trains. An avid tennis player, she photographed other players, producing early action shots.

“I sometimes feel that she photographed the way people photograph today with their phones,” Mr. Moakley said. “She would take pictures of every room in her house. When she had a party she would make a photo and have a fun joke in it, like a card game where every card faced the camera.”

Some of the setups were as much commentaries on the expectations society had of women at the time. Ms. Austen never married, but she spent 32 years with her companion, Gertrude Tate. Her photographs of other women revealed an interesting attitude.

Alice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House Alice Austen, left, and Gertrude Tate at Pickard’s Penny Photo in Stapleton, Staten Island.

“There is something a little tongue in cheek about those photographs,” Mr. Moakley said. “There is one picture of women in their underwear, with their hair down, smoking in a church rectory. It’s literally a photo of everything a Victorian woman shouldn’t be doing, all at once.”

Ms. Austen’s street types, he noted, were a departure. Taken over a period of several years in the mid-1890s, they were formal and straightforward, like a tourist’s guide to the city. While her biographer gave the portfolio short shrift and said they were a product of Ms. Austen’s curiosity, others feel her motives were more complicated. Mr. Moakley cites the research of Anna Conlan, who surmised that Austen may have been influenced by similar portfolios done in other cities at the time. Her work, Ms. Conlan wrote, also touched on the theme of a city changing rapidly with the arrival of new, and sometimes impoverished, immigrants.

“ ‘Street Types’ actively contributed to the popular notion of the urban picturesque,” Ms. Conlan concluded, “designed to simultaneously celebrate and control diversity, titillating the middle classes whilst reassuring them, and perhaps reassuring Austen herself, of their privileged place in the new city.”

Ms. Austen’s own fortunes tumbled after the stock market crash. Little by little, she sank into poverty, losing her home and moving into a farm colony for paupers. Luckily, thousands of her glass-plate negatives were safeguarded, and when a researcher working on a book on the history of American women discovered them in 1950, it led to a revival of interest in her life and art. The publication of her photos, and stories in Life magazine, led to donations that allowed her to move into a nursing home, as well as to a serious assessment of her work and the idea of preserving Clear Comfort as a museum. She died in 1952.

Since becoming caretaker of the house, Mr. Moakley has had time to reflect upon Ms. Austen’s legacy even in his own work. It reminds him to experiment and not to be too rigid about how he approaches photography.

“Photography is fun when you challenge yourself, work with a little bit of doubt and not be sure how things are going to turn out,” he said. “Plus, just being in that house and landscape, the light is always incredible. Alice must have been inspired by that. It’s beautiful every day in a different way.”

Alice Austen, courtesy of the Alice Austen House In a brook below Hector Falls, Watkins, N.Y. July 25, 1892.

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