Margaret Watkins

The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City and Scotland. Work by Margaret Watkins is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum and Photography Collection.

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, where Alfred Stieglitz was one of the instructors. 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.

• Illustration — Margaret Watkins: The Kitchen Sink, 1919 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. While teaching at the Clarence White school from 1916 to 1928, her students included Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner and Doris Ulmann. 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. From 1928, when she was based in Glasgow, she embarked on street photography in Russia, Germany and France, specializing in store fronts and displays. She died in Glasgow in 1969, largely forgotten as a photographer.