A fresh angle: The revolutionary gaze of Margaret Watkins in pictures | Art and design

Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins rejected traditional gender roles to become a pioneering modernist photographer with Renaissance flair Thu 12 Aug 2021 07.00BST Last modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 19.34BST

A fresh angle: The revolutionary gaze of Margaret Watkins – in pictures

Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins rejected traditional gender roles to become a pioneering modernist photographer with Renaissance flair

Main image: ‘She invented new forms’ ... Margaret Watkins. Untitled, Glasgow, 1928-1938. Photograph: Margaret Watkins/Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow

Thu 12 Aug 2021 07.00 BST Last modified on Tue 14 Sep 2021 19.34 BST

  • Untitled (Verna Skelton Posing for Cutex Advertisement), New York, 1924

    Margaret Watkins’ work engages in an incessant dialogue between art and domestic life, merging theme and object. This retrospective exhibition shows 150 of Watkins’ photographs dating from 1914 to 1939. They include portraits and landscapes, modern still lifes, street scenes, advertisements and commercial designs. Margaret Watkins: Black Light is at CentroCentro in Madrid until 26 September as part of PhotoEspaña 2021. All photographs: Margaret Watkins/Joseph Mulholland Collection, Glasgow

  • Untitled (Parrot on Hand), undated

    Ontario-born Watkins is known as one of the first female photographers in advertising. Here we have a great example of this very pictorial staging, which refers to gestures reminiscent of Renaissance paintings

  • Untitled (Graflex Camera), c. 1920

    This Graflex machine belonged to Watkins. It’s a plate camera that she bought in 1915, when she decided to become a photographer and moved to New York as an assistant to Alice Boughton

  • Still Life – Bathtub, New York, 1919

    Watkins’ world, like many women at the time, was that of the interior, the home. Watkins had the ability to see it as a pretext for inventing new forms

  • Bridge, Canaan, Connecticut, 1919

    This image, very graphic in its composition, shows the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow, a specialist in Japanese art and in particular in the art of Notan, the harmony between blacks and whites

  • Portrait Study (Verna Skelton), 1923

    This portrait of Verna Skelton is emblematic of Watkins’ portraits. We see the immediate reference to the Dutch painters, and her extraordinary ability to illuminate her subjects

  • Domestic Symphony, New York, 1919

    Domestic Symphony is a fascinating series by Watkins. She models her images on the harmony of musical compositions

  • The Blythswood Multiple (Steps 1), undated

    Watkins would take this modernist image and turn it into a photomontage to be offered to fabric and carpet manufacturers in Glasgow

  • Margaret Watkins by Frances Bode, Clarence H White School of Photography, 1921

    This portrait by Frances Bode was probably taken in the summer of 1921 when Watkins was a teacher at the Clarence H White School of Photography in New York. It is one of the few portraits of Watkins

  • Untitled, Glasgow, 1928-1938

    Watkins moved to Glasgow, the city her parents had left to emigrate to Canada, in 1928. The last series of photographs she took was of the city’s building sites
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