Seduced by modernity : the photography of Margaret Watkins

Seduced by Modernity is the first book devoted to the life and work of Canadian-born modernist photographer Margaret Watkins. Best known for art and advertising photography executed in New York in the 1920s, Watkins was active in the Clarence White school of photography and a participant in the shift from pictorialism to modernism. Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie tell the story of a dedicated artist in difficult circumstances whose working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and the witnessing of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. The authors use feminist and historical questions as well as close readings of the photographs to relate Watkins' work to questions of gender, modernity, and visual culture. Watkins' modernism, which involved experimentation and a radical focus on form, transgressed boundaries of conventional, high-art subject matter. Her focus was daily life and her photographs, whether an exploration of the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow, and Leningrad in the 1930s, strike a balance between abstraction and an evocation of the everyday, offering a unique gendered perspective on modernism and modernity. Seduced by Modernity makes available for the first time an extensive representation of Watkins' work in high-quality reproduction as part of an exemplary interdisciplinary study that honours an intrepid Canadian artist who refused to be confined by borders, convention, or gender Content: Domesticated to death" : Watkins in Hamilton -- "Like a butterfly hitched to a plow" : becoming an artist, 1909-1915 -- Circulating bodies and selves : Watkins's studies, portraits, and nudes -- Making home in the metropolis : domestic still-life photography -- "Strange offerings" : gender, modernist form, and the selling of modernity -- Modernity and magic : Watkins in Europe, 1928-1931 -- "A study in brass tacks" : photographing in the USSR, 1933 -- The imagined city : Glasgow in the thirties and forties -- Later life and legacy. Devoted to life and work of Canadian-born photographer Margaret Watkins, this book tells the story of an artist in difficult circumstances whose working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and witnessing of first Soviet Five-Year Plan. It makes available Watkins' work in reproduction as part of an interdisciplinary study. 'Seduced by Modernity' is three things - a vivid biography of a fascinating person; an analysis of the oeuvre of an important artist-photographer; and a study of the interrelations of 20th century art, gender, and mass culture, interlaced with supporting theoretical passages. A richly illustrated and vivid account of the life and work of an important Canadian modernist photographer Mary O'connor And Katherine Tweedie. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 299-310) And Index.