Diana Mara Henry

The house was in disrepair and deteriorated further over the years, as DMH researched the work of the owner (1866–1952) for whom it is named, pioneering photographer E. Alice Austen.

Diana Mara Henry, who had left the Advance to take up a career in photography, wanted to produce a book of famous women photographers to inspire and encourage young women to adopt the profession by offering them role models of other daring and accomplished women in the field.

Upon discovering that Ann Novotny was preparing a book to be entitled Alice's World, Henry contacted her and joined The Friends of Alice Austen.

The group undertook to place a marker in a ceremony at Alice Austen's gravesite and, after Ann Novotny's demise, to have a Staten Island ferry named in her honor.

Henry's documentation of the condition of the house and the progress of the restoration were included in the Historic Structures Report that preceded and accompanied the saving of the house.

The Alice Austen House, also named Clear Comfort, became a NYC Landmark when, as Vice-President of the Friends of the Alice Austen House, under the leadership of Margaret Riggs Buckwalter, Diana Mara Henry lobbied successfully for the city to grant $1,025,000 to restore the house and open it as a museum.

He gave her her first camera, an Ansco Pioneer, when she was three years old and had himself been a filmmaker of his family's European travels in 1927 and 1929.

Together they attended avant-garde film showings at the Cincinnati Museums and viewed North By Northwest multiple times.

Henry's mother Edith E. Henry, a handbag and shoe designer, led them into a life a taste and travel.

Henry followed her father Carl Henry's path to Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1934.

Diana Mara Henry (born June 20, 1948, in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American freelance photographer and photojournalist.

After attending Miss Doherty's College Preparatory School for Girls in Cincinnati, Henry entered the Lycée Français de New York where she pursued the Classique course of studies including six years of Latin and four years of Greek.

During the summer of 1963 she stayed for several weeks with the family of Georges Simenon at their Chateau d'Echandens.

Admitted a year early to Radcliffe College, she received Harvard's Ferguson History Prize (1967) for her sophomore essay, "The Concept of Time and History", published that same year in the Foundation for the study of Cycles Cycles Magazine, Vol XVII, pages 67,68,69.

Henry began her career in photojournalism at Radcliffe College, as photo editor of the Harvard Crimson from 1967 to 1969.

Her photography was also published during that time in Harvard Alumni Bulletin, the Harvard Lampoon Overkill Number Brian Kahin's student film Barbara Baby (starring Barbara Lanckton Connors), The Boston Globe, Harvard Today, and Time magazine.

Her first paid assignments were for Dana Hall School and were published in the Dana Hall Bulletin Vols.

30 and 31.

She illustrated the "Clean for Gene" (McCarthy) campaign pro bono.

She also wrote feature and news articles for the Crimson about Jerry Rubin and Frank Bardacke and the Boston Black Panther Party and "Probing Antioch College's Novel Psyche"

In the summer of 1968, she worked at publicity assistant on location for the David Wolper production of the film If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.

She received her A.B. in Government from Harvard University in 1969.

Diana Mara Henry first set foot at the Alice Austen House in 1970, when she was writing a feature article for the Staten Island Advance, the NYC borough's Newhouse daily newspaper for which she was working as a General Assignment reporter.

Before turning to photography full-time in 1971, she worked as a researcher for the NBC News documentary, From Here to the Seventies, in 1969, and as a general assignment reporter, news and features, for the Staten Island Advance, a Newhouse daily, in 1970.

For the decade 1971–1981, she continued the reportage she had begun in 1970 with her feature articles about Ed Murphy, an early Vietnam Veterans Against the War leader, for the Staten Island Advance and photographed the Memorial Day demonstration at Boston Common and at Lexington and Concord in the days preceding.

She continued on to photographing the hunger strike at the VA Hospital in Westwood.

In 1971, Henry began to learn the technical side of photography by working as an assistant at Steve Eisenberg's studio at 123 West 28th Street, and by starting to photograph one of her most enduring subjects: the anti-war movement, including a demonstration at the Internal Revenue Service "Don't Pay War Taxes."

One of Henry's first and most successful assignments was to photograph Elizabeth Holtzman on the Brooklyn Bridge for her primary campaign in 1972.

Besides being used in the campaign literature, her photographs were published in Juris Doctor magazine and in the Congresswoman's autobiography, Who Said it Would be Easy? The Congresswoman credits Henry's photograph for helping her win her seat in Congress.

That was the year Henry also began to photograph Bella Abzug, her most enduring friend and significant client.

Henry's photographs were used in all the Congresswoman's subsequent campaigns for Senate and Mayor.

Henry's adventures with the George McGovern campaign, starting with getting on the press bus in New Hampshire and going through the convention in Miami Beach, at which she photographed a young Bill Clinton, are detailed in her book, Women on the Move. In her introduction to Henry's book, Professor Nancy C. Unger, author of Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (Oxford University Press) writes: "In Women on the Move, Diana Mara Henry's striking photographs bring to life the excitement, the tension, the joy, and the drama of this inspiring period in which anything seemed possible ... Through Henry's eyes, we see these women as heroic, but also deeply human. Her image of Eunice Shriver's careworn face in a pensive moment at the 1972 Democratic Convention reveals a profound beauty."

Henry's photographs for Reliable Source in Miami illustrated articles including "The issue is more than women" by Gloria Steinem on October 7, 1972.

Henry also became the staff photographer for the short-lived newspaper Brooklyn Today.

In 1973 she photographed James Brown in performance at Riker's Island at the behest of William Van den Heuvel.

Besides her photography of the Women's Movement, including paid assignments for the National Commission for the Observance of International Women's Year, Henry chose to photograph many events on her own initiative such as the Women's Pentagon Action in 1980 and the demonstration at The New York Times for the use of the term Ms in 1974, demonstration against decades-long sex experiments on cats at the Museum of Natural History, the 1977 strike at radio station WBAI against Pacifica, and other often obscure events and personalities that she considered historic and that would be unknown to this day without her visual testimony.

Now a National Historic Landmark, the house was inducted in 2002 into the National Trust for Historic Preservation's highly selective group of Historic Artists' Homes and Studios.

Ron Kovic was moved to write to her on July 25, 2010: "Your photos are beautiful and represent such a powerful and passionate time in American history. I believe these photos will last and many years from now they will be looked at and studied just as Mathew Brady's classic and haunting Civil war photos are today."

For each of the events she photographed, she collected and preserved massive amounts of documentation in the form of leaflets, press releases, guest lists, personal monograph statements, and continued the conversations, documentation and publication of the ephemera through her website.

This historic collection, along with the photographs, has found a home at the Du Bois Library of U Mass Amherst.