Alice Austen: Early American Photographer

The Alice Austen House is the only museum devoted to a woman photographer in the United States, and one of very few preserved artist’s homes and studios in New York City. Alice Austen, born in 1866, was a trailblazer – a rebel who broke away from the constraints of her Victorian environment and forged an independent life that pushed boundaries of acceptable female behavior and social rules. Her family’s home, Clear Comfort, now the museum, shaped Alice Austen’s experiences, served as her first studio space and darkroom, and opened up to her a world of subjects beyond her comfortable, upper-middle class suburban existence.