Too Good to Get Married
Bonnie Yochelson’s enlightening biography Too Good to Get Married captures the life and work of nineteenth-century lesbian photographer Alice Austen.
Born in March 1866, Austen, an amateur photographer living among elite Staten Island society, mastered her craft. Her images revealed her family, social, and cultural influences, including the sway her friendships had on her. Although Austen was discreet in her romantic life, she and Gertrude Tate found independence and lifelong devotion together. When she was an octogenarian, she finally gained national exposure via a detailed photographic essay in LIFE magazine. Later, her home, Clear Comfort, became the Alice Austen House museum, a foundation for artistic inspiration.
Drawing on Austen’s images, letters, personal scrapbooks, published articles, and an earlier 1976 biography, the book reveals Austen’s personality and character. She showed fervent interest in learning photography from her Uncle Oswald and was meticulous in taking note of the subjects, dates, times, and exposures of her images. Before the turn of the century, Austen’s photographs of city street scenes gave her greater photographic independence. Atypical for women of the period, she ventured into gritty areas of Manhattan to snap street vendors and immigrants and approached strangers for photographs.
Annotated black-and-white photographs of Austen’s family, servants, and pets show their posed subjects in clear focus with sharp contrasts. She recognized her learning curve managing outdoor lighting, too, taking two separate exposures of a tennis party relaxing on the lawn. Later, a romantic portrait of Tate revealed her advanced techniques: Austen used light and shadow to accentuate the glow on Tate’s face and arms.
Too Good to Get Married is an assiduous, revealing biography of a complex early feminist photographer who carved her own path.
Reviewed by
Katy Keffer
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