Bonnie Yochelson is the author of the new biography Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen. Yochelson's other books include Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half. She is a former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.
Q: What inspired you to write this biography of the photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952)?
A: In the 1990s, I was Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, and since leaving the museum staff, I have worked as an independent scholar and curator, organizing exhibitions and writing books on New York photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, and Jacob Riis.
My approach to research and writing evolved from my curatorial practice: by studying photographic archives—I developed fresh narratives about photographers already known to the general public but in need of up-to-date scholarly attention. The only book on Austen was written in 1976; she fit my model perfectly.
Alice Austen photographs—more than 7,000 negatives and prints—belong to Historic Richmond Town (HRT) on Staten Island. In the early 2000s, then chief curator Maxine Friedman asked my advice on updating the collection’s access and preservation. She went on to supervise the cataloging and scanning of the collection, and largely as a labor of love, she researched the people and events depicted in the photographs.
Maxine’s achievement inspired me to write a new book on Austen. HRT raised some money to support the project, but it was not until 2017 that I was free to start research. Which is to say, it took a long time to get started and a long time to finish, but I am so glad I stuck with it!
Q: How did you choose the photographs to include in the book?
A: The 143 illustrations in the book document Austen’s life. Because I had access to the photographs on a laptop at home, searchable by subject, date, size, etc., the photographs were my primary source of evidence.
The book’s illustrations also showcase Austen’s photographs. She was not interested in the pictorial movement, popular at the time, which advocated for photography as a fine art. Austen did not consider herself an artist, but she was a superb craftsman who used the camera to express her love of nature and family as well as her wry and sometimes radical sense of humor.
I worked with the book designer to assure that text and image worked well together, and I wrote brief captions to allow the reader to follow the story semi-independent of the text. Although I haven’t yet seen the printed book, HRT subsidized the printing to enhance the appearance of the illustrations.
Q: The writer and scholar Lillian Faderman said of the book, “Bonnie Yochelson traces the extraordinary story of how a 19th-century upper-class social butterfly became a pioneering woman photographer who lived most of her life in a loving lesbian partnership.” What do you think of that description?
A: It tells the tale, I love it. I am indebted to Faderman, a pioneer scholar of LGBTQ history, who read an early version of the manuscript and encouraged me to explain Austen’s evolving sexual identity, despite the lack of direct evidence.
Today, Austen is celebrated for a handful of satirical photographs of her with her friends mocking Victorian conventions of femininity: dressing in men’s clothing, posing as prostitutes, feigning drunkenness, and sharing a bed. She took these photographs in 1890-91, when she was a “social butterfly,” going to dances and flirting with men.
At the time, the very idea of women physically loving women was not acknowledged, and the term “lesbian” was not yet in use. But only a few years later in 1897, Austen met Gertrude Tate, they fell in love, and they lived together for 50 years, becoming, as it were, a lesbian couple.
Through Faderman’s scholarship and her encouragement, I came up with a plausible interpretation for the photographs and an explanation for the course of events, which forms the heart of the book.
Q: How would you describe Austen’s legacy today?
A: In the 1990s, two separate Austen audiences emerged: photographic historians heralded her “New York Street Types,” which depicted working people on the streets of Manhattan; and gender historians celebrated her “lesbian” photographs.
More recently, these photographs have gone viral online, and Austen is something of an LGBTQ icon. The Alice Austen House, which became a museum in 1985 and for many years suppressed the romantic nature of Alice and Gertrude’s relationship, now celebrates it.
My book offers an up-to-date and enjoyable introduction of Austen to these audiences and to those drawn to histories of the Gilded Age, American women, and New York City.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am executor of the estate of my friend Margaret Morton (1948-2020), a photographer who was a professor of art at Cooper Union for more than 30 years.
We met in 1989 when I saw her first photographs of homeless encampments in the East Village and acquired some of them for the Museum of the City of New York. We remained colleagues and friends, and she asked me to be her executor to preserve her work.
To that end, I’ve established the Margaret Morton Archive, and have begun to donate her work to public institutions. The Archives of American Art has committed to taking her papers, and the Museum of the City of New York has claimed The Tunnel, which documented a community living in an abandoned Amtrak tunnel.
I have an amazing staff of three, and we hope to complete our work and close the archive by the end of 2027. Please check out margaretmorton.org.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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