Sources & Resources

Margaret Watkins published three short essays on photography and left a large archive of documents, now at the McMaster University Library in Hamilton, Ontario. She had a major solo show in New York in 1923 and exhibited in over twenty-six group shows in her lifetime, in the U.S., Canada, and internationally. Due to the efforts of her neighbour Joseph Mulholland, she has been included in photographic history since the 1990s. A major research study of her life and work is Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie’s Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (2007). Two major exhibitions of her work (Domestic Symphonies, National Gallery of Canada, 2012; and Black Light, diChroma Photography, 2021) have brought her work to a wider public.

Key Exhibitions (including Posthumous Exhibitions)

In Watkins’s Lifetime

a) Solo Exhibitions

b) Group Exhibitions

Posthumous Exhibitions

a) Solo Exhibitions

b) Selected Group Exhibitions

Watkins has had numerous solo exhibitions at The Hidden Lane Gallery, Glasgow, but these are too numerous to list.

Selected Published Writings by the Artist

“Charity” and “Sympathy.” Methodist Magazine and Review: Devoted to Religion, Literature, and Social Progress 57 (1903): 457, 320.

“Concerning the Pervasive Influence of Art.” Boston Sunday Globe, June 6, 1915.

“The House I Love.” Canadian Magazine 47, no. 3 (1916): 199.

“Advertising and Photography.” Pictorial Photography in America 4 (1926).

“Editorial Comment.” Pictorial Photography in America 4 (1926).

“How My Art Enriches Life.” Ground-Glass: Bulletin of the Newark Camera Club 8 (September 1926): 5.

Selected Writings on the Artist’s Work

Mulholland, Joseph, writings from 1972 to 2021. Multiple articles on the life and work of Margaret Watkins, including:

Mulholland, Joseph. “Chance Request Leads to Discovery and Exhibit at Light Gallery.” Photograph Collector, May 15, 1984.

———“Glasgow Notes” and “Margaret Watkins in Russia.” Glasgow Review, Summer 1997, 18, 23–28.

———“A Life in Photographs.” In Margaret Watkins, 1884–1969: Photographs, edited by Martha McCulloch. Glasgow: Street Level Gallery and Workshop, 1994.

———“Photographs by Margaret Watkins.” Glasgow Review, Summer 1972, 23.

———“Portrait of an Artist.” Scottish Field, October 1981, 73–78.

———“A Reminiscence.” In Margaret Watkins: Photographs 1917–1930. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1981.

———“A Sad Strange Gleam of Vision.” Photograph Collector, Spring 1982.

———“Preface.” In Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, by Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, xvii–xx. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

———“Margaret Watkins.” In Margaret Watkins: Domestic Symphonies, by Lori Pauli, 8–11. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2012.

———“Miss Watkins.” In Margaret Watkins: Black Light, edited by Anne Morin, 17–18. Madrid: diChroma Photography, 2021.

Mulholland, Joseph, and George Oliver. Margaret Watkins: Photographs 1917–1930. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1981.

Publications from The Hidden Lane Gallery, Glasgow: Margaret Watkins – Forgotten Woman (2009/2015), Glasgow in the 1930s (2010/2015), Glasgow in the 1930s II (2014), Paris 1933 (2011), Leningrad and Moscow 1933 – I (2012), Art and Advertising (2013), and London in the 1930s (2015).

“A Fresh Angle: The Revolutionary Gaze of Margaret Watkins—in Pictures.” Guardian, August 12, 2021.

“Photography Comes into the Kitchen: A Group of Photographs by Margaret Watkins Showing Modernist, or Cubist, Patterns in Composition.” Vanity Fair, October 1921, 60.

Borcoman, James. Magicians of Light. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1993.

Fulton, Marianne, ed. Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography. New York: Rizzoli, 1996. Includes Bonnie Yochelson, “Clarence H. White, Peaceful Warrior”; and Kathleen A. Erwin, “‘Photography of the Better Type’: The Teaching of Clarence H. White” and “Biographies.”

Margaret Watkins: 1884–1960: Photographs. Glasgow, Street Level Gallery, 1996. Includes H. Belloff, “A Lost Feminity”; J. Mulholland, “A Life in Photographs”; and L. Pauli, “‘A Few Hellers’: Women at the Clarence H. White School of Photography.”

Morin, Anne, ed. Black Light. Madrid: diChroma Photography, 2021. Including Anne Morin, “Black Light”; Mary O’Connor, “Pivotal Moments in the Photography of Margaret Watkins: 1928, 1923”; and Tintin Törncrantz, “Margaret Watkins at Last Revealed.”

O’Connor, Mary, and Katherine Tweedie. Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007.

O’Connor, Mary. “From Amateur to Professional: The Advertising Photography of Margaret Watkins, 1924–1928.” In Rethinking Professionalism: Essays on Women and Art in Canada, edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.

———. “La Clarence H. White School of Photography: construire un modernisme ‘à part’ Stieglitz.” In Carrefour Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Jay Bochner and Jean-Pierre Montier. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012.

———. “Margaret Watkins’s Self-Portraits.” In The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists, edited by Alicia Boutilier and Tobi Bruce. Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2015.

———. “Pivotal Moments in the Photography of Margaret Watkins: 1928, 1923.” In Black Light, edited by Anne Morin. Madrid: diChroma Photography, 2021.

———. “The Objects of Modernism: Everyday Life in Women’s Magazines, Gertrude Stein and Margaret Watkins.” In American Modernism across the Arts, edited by Jay Bochner and Justin Edwards. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Parsons, Sarah. “Margaret Watkins.” In Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment, edited by Sarah Milroy, 197–98. Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2021.

Pauli, Lori. “Margaret Watkins: Making It Home.” Studies in Photography 5 (2000–01): 16–23.

———. “‘A Few Hellers’: Women at the Clarence H. White School of Photography.” In Margaret Watkins: 1884–1960: Photographs. Glasgow: Street Level Gallery, 1996.

———. “Margaret Watkins: A Life in Three Parts.” In Domestic Symphonies. Ottawa: NGC, 2012.

Archival Sources

Clarence H. White and the Clarence H. White School of Photography Archive, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton

Joseph Mulholland, Glasgow, Scotland. Watkins’s photographs, negatives, and contact prints

Glasgow City Archives. Anderson Family Papers. Mitchell Library, Glasgow

Lanier Camp (Eliot, Maine) papers, Maine Historical Society, Portland

Laura Gilpin Archive, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Library of Congress, Washington:

Clarence H. White Collection, Prints and Photographs Division

Warren and Margot Coville Collection, Prints and Photographs Division

Henry Putnum Correspondence, Collections of the Manuscript Division

Margaret Watkins Fonds, William Ready Division of the Archives and Research Collections, Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario

Key Interview with the Artist

Christian Science Monitor, quoted in “Former Hamilton Girl in Greenwich Village,” Hamilton Spectator, April 26, 1929.

Audio and Video about the Artist

Peter Le Neve Foster, Seeing the USSR, 1933, fifteen-minute film of the Royal Photographic Society group’s (including Watkins) visit to Leningrad and Moscow

Barnaby Robson, Watkins, in Malcolm Lindsay, After the Snow, 2015, musical composition, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxAHSBJgKbk

Anne Morin, Margaret Watkins: Black Light, Kutxa Kultur Artegunea, San Sebastian (Spanish), 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDkhG6dKVKk

Anne Morin and Joseph Mulholland, Close up: Margaret Watkins, Street Level Photoworks, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APilRHcXBJQ

Mary O’Connor and Katherine Tweedie, Archive Traces: Margaret Watkins Photographer, 2022, fourteen-minute film

Margaret Watkins: Not an Everyday Life – A Conversation with Mary O’Connor, Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILk9e4u5Ybo

Further Readings

Davidov, Judith Fryer. Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Dow, Arthur Wesley. Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. 1920. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Lundgren, Adrienne. “Cyanotype, Platinum and Palladium Printing: The Siderotype Artistry of Clarence H. White.” In Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925, edited by Anne McCauley, 342–52. New Haven and London: Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2017.

McCauley, Anne, ed. Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925. New Haven and London: Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2017.

Nelson, Andrea. The New Woman Behind the Camera. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2020.

Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. 1994. 3rd ed., Paris: Abbeville Press, 2010.