Concordia Journal Home > Archives > November 8, 2007 issue >

The woman behind The Kitchen Sink 

By Barbara Black

Famous, forgotten, rediscovered: That’s the career trajectory of a Canadian-born photographer who is the subject of a new book.

Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (McGill-Queen’s University Press) was written by Mary O’Connor, an English professor from McMaster University, and Katherine Tweedie, who has just retired from teaching photography at Concordia.

Watkins became celebrated in the emerging field of art and commercial photography in the 1920s through the original way she combined homely subject matter with a sculptural modernist aesthetic.

Her most famous photo was called The Kitchen Sink: a sink of dirty dishes, the planes and outlines of the milk bottle, teacup, faucet and their shadows on the white porcelain making an arresting still life for modern times. Her photos of domestic subjects caught the interest of retailers, who saw their potential for the rapidly evolving advertising industry.

As a young woman, Watkins left her birthplace of Hamilton, Ont., for an artistic community in upstate New York, then moved to Boston, where she first studied photography. But it was during her years living in Greenwich Village, from 1915 to 1928, that she made her mark as an avant-garde photographer.

She worked closely with Clarence H. White, a seminal photographer and teacher, but she left New York after a legal dispute with his widow over nonpayment for work she had done.

She spent most of the rest of her life in Glasgow, Scotland, living a marginal existence as the caregiver for elderly relatives. But she continued to take photographs, particularly of the busy industrial port of Glasgow, and, in the 1930s, of the industrial revolution in the USSR.

Eventually, she became a recluse. But in 1967, two years before her death, she became acquainted with a neighbour, Joseph Mulholland, a young journalist. Watkins eventually made him the executor of her will and gave him a large box, with instructions not to open it until after her death. The box contained vintage photos from her time in New York and traces of her work in Europe.

In 1984, Mulholland mounted an exhibition at New York’s Light Gallery of Watkins’ work, reviving interest in the “kitchen sink” photographer who had been such a pioneer in advertising 60 years earlier. Canada’s National Gallery acquired several of them.

Mulholland gave Tweedie and O’Connor access to his vast collection for the creation of this book. A decade was spent on the project, which was initially supported by a grant from SSHRC.