Of Sinks and Secrets

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Andrew O’Hagan stole my character. No one owns a literary character or a real person who inspired a fictional one. Moreover, I had abandoned Margaret Watkins before I discovered her in a novel by O’Hagan.

To begin at the beginning, few people have ever heard of the Canadian woman who left a life of stultifying middle-class domesticity in Hamilton to become one of the brightest lights in modernist photography in New York City. The circles in which Watkins moved, including her students Margaret Bourke-White and Paul Outerbridge, and the exhibitions and sales of her work were more than enviable. Then, in 1928, in her forties and at the peak of her career, she decided to visit her aunts in Glasgow and spend a few months in Europe. She never returned.

After a few expeditions photographing urban life in Russia and Germany in the 1930s, Watkins seems to have almost stopped taking pictures. As her reputation waned, she devoted...