SC Talk: Mary O’Connor, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, “Reading Photographs, Reading Archives: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (1884-1969)”

Title: Reading Photographs, Reading Archives: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (1884-1969)

Speaker: Mary O’Connor, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Introducer and Zoom host: Linda Hutcheon

Abstract: On the occasion of a major exhibition opening at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, I will introduce the photography of Margaret Watkins, a successful art and advertising photographer in the 1920s in New York City. Trained in both Pictorialist (soft-focus) and Cubist principles, she was instrumental, through her own work and her teaching, in the movement toward modernism in American photography. From her Greenwich Village studio apartment, she invented a new genre of photograph, referred to as “kitchen still life.” This genre, in turn, translated into a model for effective advertising illustrations.  She taught at the Clarence H. White School of Photography and was on the executive of both the Pictorialist Photographers of America and the Art Center of New York. In this talk, I will present the range of her photography, from portraits and nudes, through still life and advertising images, to street scenes in Paris and Moscow, and industrial sites in Glasgow. The later photographs of the early 1930s will find comparisons with European “New Objectivity” and Soviet artists. The talk will also trace my nearly thirty-year interest in her work, cataloguing the thousands of photographs owned by Joseph Mulholland, Watkins’s neighbour in Glasgow, and reading her extensive archive of letters, diaries, marginalia, or notes on scrap-paper, all of which our now housed at McMaster University Library. This talk is also about “reading place,” since Watkins lived for a short while around the block from my home in Hamilton.

Bio: Mary O’Connor (PhD University of Toronto, 1979) is Professor Emerita of the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research interest in modernist culture (1890 – 1939) has remained constant since her doctoral work, despite the many tangents of her research life: African American women’s writing; 17^th century women’s life-writing; women’s health promotion, including gender and health in Mozambique; and curating art exhibitions, including “The Archive and Everyday Life” at the Ontario Science Centre in 2015. Arguably, the main thread of her research has been about everyday life. Her work on Margaret Watkins has appeared in exhibition catalogues, chapters in books, and in her co-authored monograph with Katherine Tweedie: Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins (MQUP 2007). She has recently co-created with Tweedie a short film on Watkins that will show with the Art Gallery of Hamilton exhibition of Margaret Watkins’s work: Black Light (curated in Madrid by diChroma Photography).

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/WftNqgs39V

The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

The speaker will be participating via Zoom. This will be a hybrid event. You may choose to eat lunch at the Faculty Club with other Fellows, then watch the Zoom link from there, or to register for Zoom only. The deadline to register is 3 PM on the preceding Monday.

Everyone who enters the Faculty Club must provide proof of full vaccination and identification to verify. Once in the building, please wear a mask until seated but you may remove it when eating or drinking. The mask must be put on if moving about the building.  If you have questions about coming to the Faculty Club, contact Daphne Maurer, daphne@maurer.ca.

If you have any questions regarding registration, please contact the organizer Linda Hutcheon at l.hutcheon@utoronto.ca.