Working Light: The Wandering Life of Photographer Edith S. Watson (Women's Experience Series)

by Frances Rooney

From the 1890s to the 1930s Edith S. Watson, self-supporting, itinerant, artistic and commercial photographer, travelled across Canada documenting the lives of rural people, frequently women, at work. Working Light is her story. From outport Newfoundland to the Queen Charlotte Islands she captured images of labouring people in the precarious, poignant, often gruelling act of building a country. Her subjects and their ways of living are gone, but Watson's pictures are recognizable and compelling talismans of Canada's national psyche and a social history that is very much alive. She photographed women working the fish flakes in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; making soap, weaving, and spinning in Quebec and across the Prairies and into British Columbia; mending fish nets outside Vancouver; caring for children from Newfoundland to northern Ontario, The Pas, and Brilliant, B.C.; harvesting beets outside Winnipeg and flax in Saskatchewan. Watson explored established communities, newly settled immigrant ones - she spent three summers among the Doukhobours in Alberta and British Columbia - and Native and Inuit life. Watson lived and worked with Bermudian journalist Victoria Hayward, who coined the phrase "Canadian mosaic" in their book Romantic Canada.

123 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Frances Rooney is a writer, editor, and spiritual director who lives in Toronto. Her books include Working Light: The Wandering Life of Photographer Edith S. Watson (published in Canada, the U.S., and Britain) and Our Lives (finalist for the Lambda Award). Frances has written two books for the Women’s Hall of Fame Series – her first was Extraordinary Women Explorers.

Reviews

[Emily-Jane Orford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very well-written, interesting introduction into the life of Edith Watson, a prolific and talented photographer of the early 1900s. Her life, and that of her partner, Victoria Hayworth, is just another example of an extra-ordinary person whose story was just waiting to be told. Rooney presents the reader with a person who, otherwise, might have been left forgotten in the annals of history. Well done! Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford, award-winning author of "The Whistling Bishop" and "F-Stop: A Life in Pictures".