Books in Brief: Alice’s World

Alice’s World, The Life and Photography of an American Original: Alice Austen, 1866-1952, by Ann Novotny (Chatham Press, 224 pp., $22.50). For anyone who has ever had to teach American history, photography is a personal friend of very real, if not easily specified, value. Consider only the story of the Presidency. I doubt that anyone would sharply challenge my contention that George Washington, with all respect to that truly great man, somehow just fails to come alive for most of us in quite the same way that, say, Abraham Lincoln or even Ulysses Grant does. But how many of us recognize that, whatever other reasons there may be, much of this is owing to the simple fact that we do not possess a single photograph of our first President? The introduction of photography in the nineteenth century added to our history a dimension of near first-hand realism. And rarely has the service photography has given historiography been more evident than in the work of the late Alice Austen. Better than 170 photographs from a surviving total of some four thousand taken by Miss Austen are reproduced in this biography. Her evident artistry aside, what she recorded with her camera beginning nearly a century ago was what we today call “social history” (though like her contemporaries she would have found that term pretentious); her patient, careful work with her primitive, bulky camera has preserved for us a treasure trove of late nineteenth century Americana, especially from the then-fashionable world of Staten Island. As Paul Vanderbilt, one-time curator of photographs at the Library of Congress, remarked, “She provided the best connected photographic story of the elegant family life of the Eighties and Nineties that I have ever seen.” Just as interesting and revealing of nineteenth century life are her photographs of the immigrants on the streets of lower Manhattan, which are happily free of any ideologically based preoccupation with social injustice or tendentious design to provoke indignant concern for the downtrodden. Indeed, her immigrant subjects don’t look at all downtrodden. Rather, one is left, after viewing them, with a singular impression of their curiosity, self-assurance, and joy in life.

MC

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Michael F. Connors

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Alice’s World, The Life and Photography of an American Original: Alice Austen, 1866-1952, by Ann Novotny (Chatham Press, 224 pp., $22.50). For anyone who has ever had to teach American history, photography is a personal friend of very real, if not easily specified, value. Consider only the story of the Presidency. I doubt that anyone would sharply challenge my contention that George Washington, with all respect to that truly great man, somehow just fails to come alive for most of us in quite the same way that, say, Abraham Lincoln or even Ulysses Grant does. But how many of us recognize that, whatever other reasons there may be, much of this is owing to the simple fact that we do not possess a single photograph of our first President? The introduction of photography in the nineteenth century added to our history a dimension of near first-hand realism. And rarely has the service photography has given historiography been more evident than in the work of the late Alice Austen. Better than 170 photographs from a surviving total of some four thousand taken by Miss Austen are reproduced in this biography. Her evident artistry aside, what she recorded with her camera beginning nearly a century ago was what we today call “social history” (though like her contemporaries she would have found that term pretentious); her patient, careful work with her primitive, bulky camera has preserved for us a treasure trove of late nineteenth century Americana, especially from the then-fashionable world of Staten Island. As Paul Vanderbilt, one-time curator of photographs at the Library of Congress, remarked, “She provided the best connected photographic story of the elegant family life of the Eighties and Nineties that I have ever seen.” Just as interesting and revealing of nineteenth century life are her photographs of the immigrants on the streets of lower Manhattan, which are happily free of any ideologically based preoccupation with social injustice or tendentious design to provoke indignant concern for the downtrodden. Indeed, her immigrant subjects don’t look at all downtrodden. Rather, one is left, after viewing them, with a singular impression of their curiosity, self-assurance, and joy in life.