Her notable works include Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, Alfred Stieglitz New York, and Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.
Yochelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, and reported the following:
The top half of page 99 shows an 1893 self-portrait of Alice Austen. The caption reads, “When Alice left for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – the farthest she had been from home – she took a self-portrait with Punch [her dog].” The bottom half of the page describes the photographs she took at the Exposition, two of which are shown on page 100.Visit Bonnie Yochelson's website.
The Page 99 Test works very well for this book! The page features one of Austen’s many carefully considered self-portraits, and it demonstrates the key features of the book’s design: illustrations were placed in close relation to the relevant text, yet the descriptive captions allow the reader to follow the story independent of the text. The quality of the paper and the printing, which were subsidized, is also apparent.
As it happens, this photograph marks a major turning point in Austen’s life. The first full sentence on the page suggests as much: “The purposeful young woman in the smart traveling suit is a far cry from the feminine charmer in lace decollete and elbow length gloves of the previous summer.” In the 1880s, Austen was a social butterfly, playing tennis, and going swimming and boating, with a full social calendar of dances, concert, dinners and balls, both at home and on vacation. What she called “the larky life” was the primary subject of her photographs. As she and her friends approached 25 in 1890, the pleasure of these social rituals gave way to the expectation of marriage and children, a rocky road for most of them. At this point, Austen briefly took up the idea of professional photography, which she first attempted at the Chicago Exposition.
--Marshal Zeringue
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