Alice Austen's became interested in photography when her uncle, Oswald Müller, brought home a camera around 1876. Alice's uncle Peter Townsend Austen was a chemistry professor at Rutgers who taught her photographic processing. Peter and Oswald converted a closet on the second floor into Alice's darkroom. The earliest extant photograph by her is dated 1884. Over the next 40 years she produced around 8,000 photographs. This is a view from her home - now a national landmark. Austen's subject was daily life of the people of New York. She documented upper middle-class society on Staten Island and lower-class people living in New York's Lower East Side. Her images of immigrants showed "a hesitancy and curiosity experienced by both photographer and subject."