Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (review)

After spending the better part of the 1970s hunting through archives for traces of ordinary women’s lives, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously concluded that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history.’ Seduced by Modernity suggests that Canadian-born photographer Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) was just well-behaved enough to be forgotten, but accomplished, irreverent, and adventurous enough to be an engaging biographical subject in the right hands. O’Connor and Tweedie take their cues from the tradition of women’s life writing, carefully balancing an assessment of Watkins’s photographs with an empathetic, but not hagiographic, account of her life and times. Watkins’s comfortable bourgeois childhood in Hamilton ended abruptly when her family lost their department store, triggering a spiral of financial and emotional breakdowns. As a young woman, Watkins escaped to New York, where she took up photography, taught at the Clarence White School, built a commercial career, and exhibited in some prominent galleries. A series of unfortunate events led her to Glasgow in middle age, where she continued to produce interesting modernist images for some time before giving up photography at the end of the 1930s.

O’Connor and Tweedie’s feminist approach to Watkins yields a book with resonance well beyond the history of art and photography. Far-reaching and meticulous archival work is the backbone of the project, and the authors make excellent use of Watkins’s own writings, such as adolescent diaries, business correspondence, and poetry. These serve as a rich basis on which to build a narrative of her practice and its cultural importance. In particular, the chapter on Watkins’s advertising work as ‘selling modernity’ is a compelling, nuanced case study in the relationships between gender, consumption, and modernity. The authors analyze the ideological and material conditions that brought Watkins’s modernist, domestic still lifes, most famously an angular close-up of her not-quite-clean kitchen sink, to the advertising business.

Well over one hundred beautifully reproduced photographs in the book, mostly by Watkins, enable the reader to analyze and examine carefully Watkins’s production in relation to the stories of her life and historical context. Including so many images in this age of limited publication funding is a remarkable achievement and provides an essential service to those who may want to continue work on Watkins. For the fields of art history and the history of photography, this is particularly welcome because there is little information in Seduced by Modernity about Watkins’s photographic technique and, in places, the photographs seem to call out for more complex and extensive visual analysis. For instance, the chapter ‘Circulating Bodies’ does not attend to the material contexts in which the images circulated. The chapter is driven more by admittedly interesting theories about the body in representation, but as a result claims about the possible meanings of the images are less convincing than they could be, and the chapter does not adequately explain what Watkins contributes to these theoretical ideas.

However, where the book falls short, it does so in the pursuit of other ambitious goals and, in the process, the authors provide extremely useful material for future researchers. O’Connor and Tweedie’s impressive and immensely readable achievement makes it unlikely that Watkins will be forgotten again.