Alice’s life seemed to have no light at the end of the tunnel, but an interview saved her from oblivion and she was able to make her work known.
Travel through Europe, a family mansion full of antique furniture and an unbreakable couple was the life he led Alice Austena woman from the upper class of New York who knew how to take advantage of his fortune. However, what few knew was that behind this facade, he had a very particular hobby.
Women dressed in suits and men’s clothing, with their hair down and wild, or looking flirty at the camera while they smoked a cigarette, were one of the scenes that circulated through the mansion. They modeled, Austen photographed them. It was all for fun, until the economic crisis that USA In 1929 the course of its history changed.
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Alice Austen’s photographs
From the moment she owned her first camera, and helped by her uncle with the developing processes, she did not stop photographing her surroundings. Over time, she positioned herself as a transgressive photographer who challenged the limits of morality.
Critics were scandalized by the scenes with friends where the photographer herself and her partner appeared, Gertrude Tate. Images that showed, for example, three women sharing a bed covered up to their necks by sheets, two couples holding each other by the waist with a chaotic landscape in the background, or a group portrait of the women. models dressed as men with mustache and tailcoat.
How he lost his wealth in the crisis of 1929
Coming from a wealthy social classWithout monetary needs and conflicts, Austen and Tate lived without too many worries. However, over time he had to find a way to continue producing money, so he opted for investments. After the Great Depression that the United States went through, everything they had generated disappeared and they lost their savings.
When they ran out of the little money they had left, and after selling the mansion where they lived, Tate went to live with his family in Queens and Alice, where he They refused to receive in the same househad to seek refuge at home Staten Island Farm Colony. Thanks to the contacts he generated there, he was able to make his story and his photographs known through a interview What did he do with the magazine?life“, and thus be able to spend the last years of his life in a private home and with his partner.
Source: Ambito
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