The photographs of Margaret Watkins are like the choruses of a love song. They are delicate like rare flowers one refrains from picking; the impulse to touch them, or to possess them, would damage their beauty. Better to keep a distance and enjoy the simple pleasure of admiring them.
It is the inseparable link that Watkins saw between music and photography that led her to produce the 95 elegant works now on display in a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Canada. In 1923, in response to a magazine preparing a profile of her, the photographer summed up her life with the words: “Born in Hamilton, Ontario, brought up on music and pictures.” Watkins only spent a part of her life in Canada, emigrating to Boston at 24, and later to New York, where the thriving cultural scene satisfied her passion for concerts and opera.
