WOMAN WITH A CAMERA
Exhibition of Margaret Watkins’ photos brings Hamilton native back into the limelight
A woman who lived across the street gave Joseph Mulholland a big black box. She told him not to open it until after her death.
Her name was Margaret Watkins. She and Mulholland, a Scottish journalist with an interest in photography, had met and talked on many occasions. But, she never told him she had been a successful photographer, one of the 20th century’s leading modernists.
When Mulholland finally opened the box after her death in 1969, he found hundreds of black and white photographs made by her many years earlier. He is responsible for returning her lost work back to the limelight.
She was living in Glasgow, Scotland, when she died in 1969 at 85, but her story begins in Hamilton, where she was born in 1884. She grew up in a house on King Street East. Her father, Frederick W. Watkins, owned a department store on James North. Her mother came from Glasgow.
Watkins left Hamilton when she was 24, moving eventually to New York City, where she made it big as a professional advertising and art photographer. Between 1919 and 1923 she was in great demand.
About 100 of her photographs are showcased in Margaret Watkins: Black Light, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. This is only the second time that Watkins’ photographs have been shown in Hamilton.
A 1921 portrait by Frances M. Bode, a friend, places Watkins in an interior in front of a mirror — a very traditional place and pose for a woman. The elegant hat in her lap underlines her femininity. There are no tools of her trade visible.
By contrast, Watkins in the earlier “Untitled (Woman with Camera)” captured a woman with a camera outdoors, an image of a female photographer that better suits a modern professional woman like herself.
Her subjects were varied and included portraits, female nudes, landscapes, city scapes and still lifes. Watkins saw them all through a modernist lens. Her sense of composition is superb. Her fondness for close-ups and ordinary mass-produced objects place her firmly among the early 20th century’s leading modern artists.
Many of Watkins’ still lifes come up close to the most ordinary of domestic objects. The close-up draws attention to them. In “Bathtub,” she chooses part of the tub in her New York apartment. A rusty metal rack contains a bar of soap and a brush.
There’s no profound symbolism here, but a gathering of textures and shapes. And then, seemingly by chance, the bit of towel and washcloth hanging at the top right and left, looking like tiny stage curtains, open to reveal — and celebrate — the objects.
When Watkins isolates an object from its usual surroundings, she renders it ambiguous, strange and surreal. “Head and Hand” rivals any surrealist photographer’s images. Watkins focuses on two incomplete bodies: one living, the other a sculpture. A human hand holds up a miniature plaster head.
By 1928, Watkins had settled in Glasgow. She took advantage of Glasgow’s shipbuilding and industrial sites to experiment with more abstract compositions.
Watkins continued to exhibit and travel. She visited the Soviet Union in 1933 and returned to Glasgow with more than 600 negatives and contact prints. Like many educated people of her day in the West, she swallowed the Russian propaganda about the wonders of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, apparently
unaware of his cruelty, which included the killing of hundreds of thousands of political opponents and the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in the famine of 1932-33.
Then one day, she packed everything up and put her talents away. If Watkins hadn’t given Mulholland the box, and he hadn’t taken up her cause, she would have been forgotten forever.
REGINA HAGGO, ART HISTORIAN, PUBLIC SPEAKER, CURATOR, YOUTUBE VIDEO MAKER AND FORMER PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY IN NEW ZEALAND.