Key Works

Margaret Watkins produced Opus 1, arguably her first art photograph, in 1914 while a student at the Clarence H. White summer school, but even at that early stage, her fundamental project was evident: to find new forms and a new way of seeing in the angles and curves of everyday life. Over her twenty-three-year career, the pioneering photographer moved from soft-focus Pictorialism to the radical presentation of domestic still-life studies—notably her dirty dishes, and the seductive folds of her enamel sink. She went on to a successful career in advertising photography, and post-1928, in step with the New Vision in Europe, she produced avant-garde urban photographs of Glasgow’s harbour and street scenes in Paris, London, and Moscow.