[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Modernity.jpg” caption=”Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, co-authored by Mary O’Connor, professor of English and Cultural Studies, and Katherine Tweedie, is being launched in New York City tonight.”]It is going to be a busy week for Mary O'Connor, professor of English and Cultural Studies. Buzz is building around her book, a richly illustrated and vivid account of the life and work of a remarkable Hamilton-born artist who was at the vanguard of modernist photography.

Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, which O'Connor co-authored with Katherine Tweedie, is being launched in New York City tonight (Robert Mann Gallery), in Hamilton on Saturday (Ewart Angus 1A1), Toronto on Sunday (Corkin Gallery) and in Montreal next Tuesday (Musee McCord).

O'Connor came across Watkins' work while on a visit to the National Gallery in Ottawa.

“They had seven of her photos and I was really struck by three of them — of her kitchen, the bathroom — wonderful still life images in her home that were a combination of modernist abstraction and a statement on women's labour and the every day routine of women,” says O'Connor. “She was able to combine the two brilliantly, and it provides a tremendous insight into life during that era.”

O'Connor started to delve into the work of Watkins and came across a private archive in Glasgow that yielded an astounding 1,200 photos. 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 in the movement from pictorialism to modernism.

Though Watkins had been born into a wealthy family, her father's business in Hamilton collapsed, and the family was plunged into penury. Watkins moved into an artistic community in New York and began to establish herself as an artist.

She defied traditional boundaries of conventional high art, and trained her lens on daily life, be it the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow and Leningrad in the 1930s.

In later life, Watkins, who never married, moved to an old home in Glasgow to look after her maiden aunts. She ended up spending the last 40 years of her life there. O'Connor says Watkins become reclusive, perhaps even agoraphobic, until a neighbour, Joseph Mulholland, having observed her shadow on a window blind of her home, befriended her.

“She was a wonderful conversationalist,” says O'Connor. In time, Watkins gave her neighbour a box, and asked him not to open it until after her death. “He obeyed her wishes and when he opened the box — this was in the early 1970s — he found these stunning photographs. She had never spoken about her art at all.”

Armed with a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, O'Connor and her partner set up a workshop in the neighbour's living room, and catalogued the photos.

The National Gallery of Canada is planning a major retrospective of Watkins' work in 2009. In the meantime, there will be smaller exhibits in New York, Toronto and Montreal.

O'Connor will be presenting the first lecture of the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art's 2007-2008 lecture series on Saturday, Sept. 22 at 8 p.m. in the Ewart Angus Centre, Room 1A1. The title of the talk will be Hamilton's Lost Modernist Photographer — Margaret Watkins.