My Dear Alice is a podcast series produced and narrated by artist and author, Pamela Bannos. Based on her own extensive research, and presented in collaboration with the Alice Austen House Museum, this exploration of the life of 19th century photographer Alice Austen is portrayed largely through letters that Austen received from 1883 through 1898. This website presents Austen’s photographs and artifacts from her scrapbooks, as mentioned in the podcast narrative.
The Alice Austen House Museum letter collection records important details regarding photographic, women’s, and LGBTQ history in the Victorian age. Alice Austen’s house on Staten Island, a 17th century cottage known as Clear Comfort, sits on the bank of the Narrows at the New York Bay, with a sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline. Austen (1866-1952) lived there her entire life, until she was evicted in 1945. The family that moved into the house in 1945 stayed for 20 years but returned to the newly renovated house-museum in 1985 with boxes of letters they had found in a closet. Now, nearly 40 years later, Bannos has ordered and transcribed the letters to reveal the rich lives of these Victorians, through whose voices, we learn of Alice Austen.
Pamela Bannos’s art and research practice highlights the lost and overlooked, exploring the links between visual representation, history, and collective memory.