Margaret Watkins: Leningrad and Moscow 1933

Margaret Watkins: Leningrad and Moscow 1933

Margaret Watkins (1884-1969) is an outstanding photographer of Canadian Scottish descent who was unknown for most of her lifetime. An acclaimed photographer in New York in the 1910s and 20s, she travelled to the Soviet Union in 1933 where she photographed street life, creating intimate portraits in place of the bombastic propaganda of the time.

After returning to Glasgow from New York in the late 1920s, Watkins fell into obscurity,  until some 40 years after her death when gallerist Joe Mulholland discovered her archive of several thousand negatives.

When she died in 1969, her bags were still packed to return to New York. She was unknown to other than a few acquaintances in Glasgow. Few, if any, knew that she had ever been a photographer. No-one was aware she had achieved fame in New York, as a peer of many who later emerged as pioneers in the development of pictorial and modernist photography. Not just as a peer – as a mentor of several, who were credited with inventing artistic approaches which she had, in fact, taught them.

Since the discovery of her archive over ten years ago, Watkins has been exhibited in Canada and Scotland, but this will be her first exhibition in London. Pushkin House has chosen to focus on Watkins’s trip to the Soviet Union – and showcase her extraordinary pictures from that visit.

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