Alice Austen was one of the first and most prolific women photographers in the United States, an artist with a strong aesthetic sensibility and a rebelliousness that broke down the constraints of Victorian society.

The provocative and highly staged images of Austen and her closest friends, including Gertrude Tate, her life companion, demonstrate Austen’s sensibility by challenging gender roles, which places her photographs within a contemporary context.

Austen received her first camera from a family member when she was 11 years old. Helped by another uncle, at a young age she learned enough technique to develop her corpus, which she assembled for fourty years straight with more than 8,000 images. They include the series made for the book Bicycling for Ladies by the Irish suffragist Maria Ward, which made the bicycle the symbol of women’s right to vote and revealed Austen’s position towards the society in which she lived.