Main entry:

O'Connor, Mary Elizabeth, 1947-

Title & Author:

Seduced by modernity : the photography of Margaret Watkins / Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie.

Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca, NY : McGill-Queen's University Press, ©2007.

Description:

xxv, 322 pages : illustrations ; 28 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-310) and index.
1: "Domesticated to death" : Watkins in Hamilton -- 2: "Like a butterfly hitched to a plow" : becoming an artist, 1909-1915 -- 3: Circulating bodies and selves : Watkins's studies, portraits, and nudes -- 4: Making home in the metropolis : domestic still-life photography -- 5: "Strange offerings" : gender, modernist form, and the selling of modernity -- 6: Modernity and magic : Watkins in Europe, 1928-1931 -- 7: "A study in brass tacks" : photographing in the USSR, 1933 -- 8: The imagined city : Glasgow in the thirties and forties -- 9: Later life and legacy.

Summary:

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.

Resources:
Table of contents
Contributor biographical information

ISBN:

9780773531192 (hardcover)
077353119X (hardcover)

Subject:

Watkins, Margaret, 1884-1969.
Watkins, Margaret, 1884-1969 Criticism and interpretation.
Watkins, Margaret, 1884-1969 Critique et interprétation.
Watkins, Margaret, (1884-1969)
Watkins, Margaret.
Women photographers Canada Biography.
Photography, Artistic History.
Femmes photographes Canada Biographies.
Photographie artistique Histoire.
Photography, Artistic.
Women photographers.
Photographie artistique Histoire et critique.
Canada.

Form/genre:

Biography.
collective biographies.
Biographies.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Added entries:

Tweedie, Katherine.

Photography of Margaret Watkins

Holdings:

Location: Library main 252875
Call No.: TR140.W3354 O3 2007
Status: Available