Alice Austen's Larky Life

"The Alice Austen House is a Victorian Gothic cottage on the Staten Island waterfront, and on the summery fall day that I visited, the view over the harbor was bright and blue. Inside, the air smelled like salt water, which suited the current exhibition: " She Sells Seashells," curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an exploration of work by queer women artists who have found freedom and community at the seashore."

"Alice Austen was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographer who spent most of her life on this particular piece of shoreline, first with her family and later with her partner, Gertrude Tate. An undated beach photograph of hers shows three women perched along the edge of the waves, exhilaration visible in their posture even as their faces are turned from the camera. Her work, which is interspersed throughout the exhibition, suggests a quietly insistent lineage for the more forthright work on view by artists of recent decades."

"In Austen's 1885 photograph "Group in Bathing Costumes," five women pose in jaunty bloomers and knee-length tunics, showing significantly less skin but just as much spirited self-possession as the nude cartoon amazons splashing around in Ana Benaroya's 2022 drawing "By the Ocean's Roar." Rolls-Bentley, in her introduction to the show, writes that the contemporary works "converse" with Austen's, "weaving personal histories and collective memory into a shore-bound archive of desire, care, possibility, and renewal.""

Alice Austen created intimate photographs of women at a Staten Island shoreline where she lived with her family and later her partner, Gertrude Tate. An exhibition at the Alice Austen House, titled "She Sells Seashells," curates work by queer women artists who found freedom and community at the seashore. Austen's images capture leisure and self-possession—women in bathing costumes, on bicycles, playing tennis, embracing one another—with vividness and quiet insistence. Contemporary works are presented in dialogue with Austen's photographs, tracing a shore-bound archive of desire, care, possibility, and renewal. A wall labeled "The Larky Life" frames Austen's leisure-focused subjects.

Read at The New Yorker