Edith Watson

Edith Sara Watson was an important photographer of Canada. She studied watercolours with her sister, Amelia Watson, and in the 1890s studied photography with her uncle, the botanist Sereno Watson. Edith Watson came to Canada in 1896 and spent the next 35 years photographing rural people, often women, working across the country. For many years she spent time during the winter in Bermuda, renting a cottage in St. George's, Bermuda and selling watercolors and hand-tinted photographs. In 1911, in Bermuda, Watson met journalist Victoria "Queenie" Hayward. After Hayward visited Watson in Connecticut the following summer, the two women lived and worked together, travelling extensively through isolated areas of Canada. With her camera, Watson documented the lives of people in Newfoundland, Labrador, the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, and then westward into Manitoba and British Columbia, while Hayward wrote about them. The two women stayed with First Nations people in Quebec and Ontario; Mennonites, Doukhobors, and other "New Canadians" in Manitoba; and Haida people in British Columbia.