Although Alice Austen was certainly not the first lesbian photographer, she was the first who is known to have photographed lesbians who could be recognised as lesbians. Using the camera’s power of authenticity, Austen photographed her friends and her lover in a way that seems remarkably overt for the time around 1900.

Alice Austen was introduced to photography when she was 10 years old by her Uncle Oswald, who brought home an early-model dry plate camera from one of his many trips abroad. Alice showed immediate and natural ability. Through experimentation she taught herself how to operate the complex camera mechanism, judge exposure, develop the heavy glass plates, and make prints. By the time she was 18 in 1884, she was not only technically skilled but artistically accomplished as well.

Alice was active, social, and well traveled. Everywhere she went, she took her camera equipment, which sometimes weighed as much as fifty pounds and often filled a steamer trunk. As a result of her desire to photograph so much of her life and the world around her, her range of subjects was extensive. In her lifetime, she created images on approximately 8,000 glass plates, of which more than 3,000 survive.

Alice remained an amateur photographer at heart, though she sold some of her work. She took pictures for the love of it-and so she had more freedom to express herself than professional Victorian women photographers. Her straightforward style anticipated documentary photography. At the same time, she used composition, pose, costuming, and satire to convey her point of view.

In her documentary approach, Austen employed all detail and precision that a photograph can produce to depict several aspects of lesbian life.

Her photograph Violet Ward on her porch with a friend shows a female couple on a porch. The portrait of the two women is highly reminiscent of the style of family portraits at the time. With Violet and her friend posing for the picture as only a couple would, the picture could just as well be a portrait of husband and wife.

Another of her photographs also plays with the social conventions of her time. Men wore suits, and women wore dresses, and if a women dressed in a suit, she was clearly identified as a ‘mannish woman’ – a lesbian. Austen was one of the first photographers confident enough to depict this well-known phenomenon, as can be seen in Julia Martin, Julia Bredt and Self Dressed Up as Men 4.40 pm, Thursday October 15th, 1891.

However, lesbian identities often expressed themselves in several ways, and Alice Austen also produced self-portraits that revealed how she was in line with the Victorian role of the woman. This can be seen in the picture Self-Portrait, Full Length with Fan Monday September 9th, 1892, which shows the feminine qualities of the woman.

A startingly explicit picture is Austen’s Trude and I Masked, Short Skirts 11pm August 6th, 1891. The two women are emotionally and physically close to each other, the attraction to each other is apparent. That is precisely the reason why their faces wear masks – being attracted to the same sex had to be hidden in Victorian times.

From these pictures we can conclude that lesbians could show their face to the camera as long as they kept within accepted social boundaries, even if the picture was a mocking subversion of social roles. However, a woman’s desire for a woman could only be shown in a sublime way.

Alice Austen did not only take pictures of her friends and her lover. She was also a social critic and documented the life of minorities and immigrants. She photographed the neigbourhood of her Staten Island home where she spent most of her life, depicting women workers, Indians and blacks. She also went to New York and took pictures of immigrants such as street sweepers, rag pickers and Irish postmen.