Archive Traces: Margaret Watkins Photographer

In 2007, Katherine Tweedie co-authored with Mary O’Connor Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, launched at the McCord Museum in 2008. As Professor Emerita at Concordia University, her eclectic practice included writing about contemporary Quebec photography and directing videos on photographers William Klein and Evergon, winning an award for innovative technique. Now 15 years later, she has co-produced and directed the film Archive Traces. The script is in Watkins’s words with her photographs of domestic objects in NYC, the male workplace on the Glasgow waterfront and the USSR in 1933. Music was her inspiration.

Biographical notes provided by the film production team

I Lease Wombs, I Don’t Sell Babies (1993)
Willaim Klien : All the Facts Are Real Fiction (1989)
Just Evergon (1988)

Mary O’Connor grew up in Montreal and is Professor Emerita at McMaster University. She has co-curated art exhibitions, including one of women’s art (Embodied Matter) at McMaster Museum of Art, and one on The Archive and Everyday Life at the Ontario Science Centre. Her research interests have varied over the years from 17^th century women’s life-writing to African American women’s novels. She has worked on Margaret Watkins since first seeing the photographer’s Kitchen Sink in 1993 at the National Gallery, publishing articles, chapters in books, a co-authored monograph on Watkins with Katherine Tweedie, and finally this film Archive Traces. This is her first film.

Biographical notes provided by the film production team