Margaret Watkins

Margaret Watkins (1884-1969) Canadian photographer, one of the earliest advertising photographers of the New Style, was born in Hamilton, Ontario. She moved to NYC in 1915 to assist portrait photographer Alice Broughton and study under the great Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) at the Clarence H. White School of Photography (1914-1942) the first school in America to teach photography and design as art forms which produced some key practitioners in art and documentary photography.

Margaret opened her own studio in Greenwich Village, where she mastered a modern style of lighting and design that lent itself perfectly to the emerging advertising. Working for Macy’s and the J. Walter Thompson Company and Fairfax, for magazines Vanity Fair and Vogue, Margaret became one of the first women photographers in American advertising and was a pioneer of the shift from Pictorialism to Modernism. She also began teaching the likes of Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, and Doris Ulmann at the White School from 1916 up to 1928 when she left for Glasgow where she took care of her aunts.

She was elected an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, and was the first female member of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Photographic Association.

She had gifted her archive to her neighbour Joe Mulholland in 1967 who was unaware of her history or career. He has since built the Hidden Lane Gallery around the collection.

In October 2012, a retrospective exhibition of her work titled “Domestic Symphonies” (referencing her love of music)  opened at the National Gallery of Canada. This exhibition showcased 108 of her photographs dating from 1914 to 1939, including portraits, landscapes, modern still lifes, street scenes, and advertising work.

Born: 8 November, 1884 in Hamilton, Canada. Died: November 1969, Glasgow, Scotland.

By Paula Vellet