Margaret Watkins

Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) was a Canadian photographer who is remembered for her innovative contributions to advertising photography. She was also a pioneering modernist photographer; her still-life images of household objects arranged in compositions influenced by abstract art were highly innovative and influential.

She lived a life of rebellion, rejection of tradition, and individual heroism; she never married, she was a successful career woman in a time when women stayed at home, and she exhibited eroticism and feminism in her art and writing.

Early life The daughter of an Ontario businessman and his Scottish wife, Watkins was born in Hamilton, Ontario on November 8, 1884. Growing up, Watkins exhibited a keen eye for design and craftsmanship, and by age 15 she was selling her own crafts in her father's department store. She also played piano and sang in the Centenary Methodist Church Choir. In 1908 Watkins left home to work at the Roycroft Arts and Crafts community and Sidney Lanier Camp. It was at these two rural utopian communities in northeast United States where she would start to learn photography.

In 1913, she moved to Boston, where she worked as an assistant in a commercial photography studio. Outside of her photography job, she wrote poetry and sang Mendelssohn and Wagner with the Temple Israel Choir. Later she landed a job with photographer Alice Boughton, in New York and she began studying with Clarence H. White at his schools in New York and Maine, Her courses at the Clarence H. White Summer School of Photography in Maine, was where her interest in photography was solidified and later on she would teach there.

Career

Watkins opened a studio in Greenwich Village, New York City, and in 1920 became editor of the annual publication Pictorial Photography in America. She worked successfully as an advertising photographer for Macy's and the J. Walter Thompson Company and Fairfax, becoming one of the first women photographers to contribute to advertising agencies. She also produced landscapes, portraits, nudes and still lifes. Her portrait subjects included many figures from the art world of New York of the time, including Sergei Rachmaninov, Ezra Winter, and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

One of the earliest art photographers in advertising, her images of everyday objects set new standards of acceptability. In 1928, Watkins embarked on a planned three-month holiday to Europe, which ended with her moving permanently to Glasgow, Scotland to care for three ailing aunts. She gave him strict instructions not open it until after she died.

In 2021, one hundred and fifty of her photographs were included in the PhotoEspana exhibition in Madrid, Spain and in November 2022 her work featured in the GLEAN exhibition at Edinburgh's City Art Centre of 14 early women photographers working in Scotland.